I'll keep a running list of any translation errors that people notice here. 4:13 - "Kvinne" isn't masculine in the same way as the others. Norwegian has 3 genders (masculine/feminine/neuter) but the masculine/feminine distinction in Norwegian is often grouped together as the "common" gender, and many dictionaries will list words with "common" gender as Masculine or as Masculine-Feminine. 5:05 - Eye should be masculine in French & Italian. 5:10 - Glass (the material) in Russian is neuter so the square should be gray. I mixed it up with a drinking glass. 6:18 - "Napf" & "Schüssel" seem to refer to two distinct things. "Napf" being a bowl for animals (straight walls) and "Schüssel" being a hemispherical bowl. 6:26 - "Auto" and "Essen" should be swapped. 17:48 - "Time" in Arabic is وقت. The word I have up there is the word for "second", but luckily they're both masculine. 17:55 - “Love” in French should be masculine. It's feminine in the plural. 19:06 - The word סכרנות is supposed to be spelled סקרנות. 19:08 - Death (מוות) should be masculine. 19:18 - “Sacré bleu” as a swear is written as “sacrebleu.” I took out the part about "Das Bridge" because I've gotten confirmation that it was just straight up wrong. Thanks to everyone for the corrections!
Someone described gramatical gender this way once and I love it; They're similar to how we consider colors hot and cold. Red is a hot color, but if I touch a red pencil, I do not expect it to be warmer than the blue pencil.
red is hot because in natural environment, you always see full red color as shining hot dangerous object in mostly situation and also summer where is hot has more hot colors like red, yellow. Winter has something different, white snow and so on
I think it's because fire and the sky in hot days are usually red-yellow-orange, while ice and cold days are usually blueish (I don't know why green is a cool color, though)
@@stephenspackman5573Basically, the color you see is based on the frequency of the light wave that hits your eye (light is not exactly a wave, but just bear with me), with red being the lowest and violet the highest frequency (this is why burning metal is red, the light it was emmiting gained more frequency and stepped from infrared to visible light, starting at the lowest point), and the energy of a photon is higher the higher the frequency (E=hf; you can search "photon energy" on Google for more information), so a "colder" color actually carries more energy, which dissipates into more heat.
isnt that because warm colors are also the colors of the sun or fire and cool colors the color of water (not really but we perceive it as blue) or ice (same as water)
Using the word "gender" in grammar is a little bit less weird in french, just because the word for "gender" is "genre", which basically means "category" or "kind". It's also used for music, books, movies, etc. It was borrowed in English in that context (music genre / book genre / movie genre). So basically, in french, a gender for people is just a kind of person just as a movie genre is just a kind of movie. And a grammatical gender is just a kind of word. Makes more sense.
I like that alot more then gender when referring to objects. I'm trying to wrap my mind around why inanimate objects were gendered in the first place. Very odd concept as an English speaker.
That's actually where the English word gender comes from. It was borrowed from French as _genre_ (note that at this point the E was a schwa in both languages), then it became _gendre_ and then the schwa was dropped but *gendr isn't possible with English phonotactics so another schwa was added between the T and R for _gender._ It also originally had the same meaning as French, but it was mostly used for grammatical gender and that usage is what gave us the modern non-linguistic meaning.
As a spanish speaker, I remember back in highschool I asked my teacher what actually made nouns femenine or masculine and the answer was just really good. "It's actually just because they sound nice, just that." And, basically is just that really.
Correct. Spanish is a romantic language, much like a lot of other latin based languages like French, Portuguese, etc., and being a romantic language implies that the language has to sound good to be correct. It's relatively easy for us native speakers to realize when a noun was linguistically misgendered because it simply sounds wrong. Saying El Casa doesn't sound good, but La Casa does.
@@_nahuel320 Well, words sound good when correct because they're correct, not the other way around. The gender of Romance words comes from gender in Latin, which if we go far enough comes from Indo-European genders. Words tend to sound good when they fit what we've learned
I usually tried to approach it this way when I didn’t know the gender of a word; “ok, what sounds like it fits best?” Followed by repeating the word with le or la in front of it for like half a minute
@techpriestessmicaela8441 I got really confused when I learned that "o sangue" (the blood in pt) was translated to "la sangre" in spanish but it does sound better than "el sangre"
@@_nahuel320You do realize its romanic language as in romans from rome. It's not romantic. And every language basically goes about the same way you describe. Misgender a word in German and people notice immediately.n
in my (german) school my teachers always said "genus" instead of "gender" or "geschlecht" (which means sex/gender like youd use in biology class) making it clear to me that grammatical gender =/= gender.
Even in English, "grammatical gender" is only called that when the actual "genders" are two or three-otherwise, they are noun classes, which starts making a lot more sense when those classes indicate things other than natural sex or linguistic quirks, like age or origin or animacy, etc.
Fun fact about Russian - coffee in Russian is masculine, but it ends with 'e' which makes it looks like neuter, and for a couple last centuries there's a lot of discussion about coffee shifting from masculine to neuter - while some language purist says it's impossible even to think about changing words gender from one to another, the more and more people just use it with "wrong" gender and it becomes more and more popular, and I think with time dictionaries will just change it.
More fun facts - it originally was borrowed as neuter and behaved like море (sea) in a sentence. Then it was standardized as masculine and now there's a popular joke that “if it's a good coffee - it's he, but if it's a bad coffee - it's it”. Also, in an attempt to rationalize the gender, people sometimes say кофий which actually sounds masculine. That's how my grandma pronounced it :)
As a Russian I also support that kofe should be neuter in Russian. It ends with "-e", for god's sake. Just some smartass pulled out of his ass that kofe should be masculine and proscribed it in the dictionary. I say once in the Russian language, you play by the rules of the language.
In Norwegian we have a three gender system like German, but for traditional reasons all feminine words can essentially be treated as masculine in writing essentially making it a sort of pseudo two-gender masculine/neuter system. In some very few dialects, people also speak like this, but it’s mostly just a thing in writing, and it’s completely optional. Just thought it’d be interesting to share this information! :) Great video btw, I really enjoyed it!
@@jonathanlange1339 Ok, maybe my wording was poor. I meant to say the three gender system is FAR more represented in speech, while the two gender system is more of a thing you find in writing, but even in writing it's optional.
This is highly imprecise. Norwegian has three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). It also has a very wide variety of dialects and sociolects, and for historical reasons, people closer (geographically or socially) to the circles of power tend to speak dialects heavily influenced by Danish, which only has two genders (common and neuter). In those dialects, indefinite forms are always masculine (“a woman and a girl” = “en kvinne og en jente” rather than “ei kvinne og ei jente”) and definite forms are _almost_ always masculine with a few exceptions: “the woman and the girl” = “kvinnen og jenta” instead of “kvinna og jenta”, “jente” being one of very few words that keeps its feminine definite form almost everywhere except in Bergen. Since these dialects are favored in bureaucratic, academic, and journalistic communication, they are also perceived as more formal and authoritative and therefore people tend to emulate them when writing. Hence, many native speakers who use the feminine orally do not use it in writing, but many native speakers do not use it orally either.
@@Squossifrage Yeah. Thanks for explaining more thoroughly. Personally I just didn't want to go into the whole tangent about multiple written languages, and Danish influence and all of that. It just seemed like a bit much to me personally.
8:50 You say "grammatical gender is not gender" - I would rather say "gender is not sex". The problem is that, particularly in English, people equate "gender" with "sex", when originally "gender" was more akin to "category" or "grouping" (and, as you pointed out, many languages have more than 2 "genders" - i.e. categories -, and sex (or lack thereof) is not always the relevant distinction). The fact that "gender" is not "sex" may be seen by analysing how other languages say the word "gender". In Portuguese, "gender" is "género" - and so you have "género masculino" (male gender) and "género feminino" (female gender). But the Portuguese word "género" also corresponds to English word "genus" (as used in Biology). For example, the scientific name of dogs is "Canis familiaris", where "Canis" identifies the genus and "familiaris" particularises the species within that genus; and common wolfs are "Canis lupus": same genus, different species. So, wolfs and dogs belong to the same genus. If you were to say the previous sentence in Portuguese, you would say they belong to the same "género" (even if you're exemplifying with a female wolf and a male dog - because you're not talking about biological sex, nor are you talking about grammatical gender, you are talking about biological genus. But more: Portuguese "género" also corresponds to English word "genre": where you say "musical genre" (jazz, rock, pop, etc.), we say "género musical". So, here, "género" does not mean biological sex, nor does it mean biological genus, nor does it mean grammatical gender - it means aesthetical style. And yet more: in informal speech, "género" may also mean "type" or "kind". When you say "There are many kinds of government", in Portuguese we may say "Existem muitos géneros de governo".
i am a linguist and i think you did a great job! lots of evidence and research cited to back up every claim you made, pointing out flaws not just in the concepts of boroditsky’s study but also with the bureaucratic side of it, incredible!!
The exclamation mark is on the wrong side for English, but I like it. I think I’ll just go along with what Spanish does ¿This works, right? ¡Okay, the exclamation mark may be mistaken for an ‘i’!
Pennies is the plural, when you are talking about physical copies of the penny. Pence is more like the way we use cents, in the US, where it refers to the monetary unit, regardless of what group of coins represent it. Pence is based on the British pound, and cents is based on the US dollar. As an example, if I ask for 10 pennies, I'm expecting 10 coins with a copper surface and Abe Lincoln's face on them. If you hand me a dime, or two nickels, that wouldn't be what I'm asking for. Maybe I'm using them for something other than representing money, such as a coinflip game, and I actually need 10 identical coins to do it, and pennies is the coin I chose. Whereas, if I ask for 10 cents, I would accept this either as 10 pennies, or 1 dime, or 2 nickels. They all mean the same thing as the monetary value they represent, and they are all ten cents. Or, if I ask for 10 pence, I'm expecting any combination of coins that add up to 10% of a British pound.
@@carultch Also, cents are created by the decimalization of currency, as centi- means "hundredth", similar to a centimeter being a hundredth of a meter.
i think you nailed it on this video! the fact that it's always non-gendered-language speakers (always english i've seen) telling us gendered-language speakers how we think about things, is a big red flag
Oh man, the amount of things that people got wrong on such elementary points is astonishing. I'm surprised this video wasn't filled with roasts, edits, and just general dunking on people. But i respect it a lot that you kept it strictly civil and educational. Thanks for your work man.
thank you, it's exactly that. gramatical "gender" is mostly phonetic, it doesn't make any sociological sense, it's just based on sounds and we never actively think of gender when we speak, only phonetics
I had a literature teacher who had a point to say on this theory She said that in cultures where 'death' is a female word, the personification of death (aka Grim Reaper, or something like Tanatos) was usually portrayed in art as a woman whereas in cultures who had it masculine usually portrayed it as a man.
and Ancient Greece has Death as a man AND Death as a woman. There’s Thanatos, Death for anyone who dies peacefully (a guy) And the Keres, Death for anyone who dies violently (many gods{?, idk if I should trust the source} that happen to be all girls) Idk any Ancient Greek but the distinction is important.
I think language absolutely changes the way we think. But it doesn't determine the way we think. There are so many associations presented in culture and language and education, that its inevitable that the way we think turns into a massive chimera of pretty nonsense. And much of it will contradict each other as each association has a very specific use case. And it becomes a real problem when people try and expand that dictation of meaning beyond its domain. Example: gender We have gender by associations and feels. So Wall-e becomes male. We have gender as classical biological reprotection. We have gender as roles in society. And yes we have gender as linguistic descriptions and characteristic. But most of those are entirely cultural based and sometimes self contradicting. Thus to imply one has some sort of determination on the other is likely wrong.
I don’t understand why anyone would actually believe that any of those descriptions of keys and bridges could ever be considered contradictory, because there are lots of keys that are chunky and heavy, and also lots of keys that are delicate and intricate. Lots of bridges are dangerous but usually those are also fragile! And most bridges are also sturdy, or long, or sometimes short. None of them could be contradictory. In fact masculine and feminine aren’t even particularly contradictory things, just opposite somehow
Genders being for the word rather than the the thing that the word describes seems familiar to how Turkish determines if a sentence is negative or positive. There are 2 classes of negativity, by structure or meaning. If you say "He didn't come" its negative in both aspects, "She wasn't without courage" on the other hand is negative in structure but positive in meaning. In Turkish you can form sentences negative in meaning without the need of structural negativity unlike English. For example: "Nor would i talk to or go near him" "Ne onunla konuşurum ne de yanına giderim"
Just wanted to mention that we don’t even call the gender of the words “gender” in lithuanian, we literally have a seperate word for it, giminė, which directly translates to kindred in english and can be used as the direct translation too.
so in polish there are 3 genders for singular nouns/numerals/adjectives and two for plural, there is also a tricky think when grammar changes in the nouns are objects/animals/people
So what I conclude from this; English is partially a gendered language: Take a look at Spanish, for example. the only thing ‘masculine’ about ‘ El manzana’ is the fact that ‘el’ is, to my knowledge, the word for ‘he’. But what if ‘el’ used for people vs ‘el’ used for inanimate objects is unrelated? Unlikely, but still kinda possible lol Now English is kinda similar! We have ‘an apple’ and ‘a banana’, which could theoretically mean ‘an’ and ‘a’ are masculine and feminine. Notice in Spanish, most masculine words end in an ‘o’ or very occasionally an ‘e’ (and feminine ending in ‘a/e’). In English, it’s at the start of a word, for similar reasons as Spanish is (being phonetics), for the end of a word (or maybe even at the start)! Saying ‘an apple’ and ‘el manzana’ just flows and sounds more natural than ‘a apple’ or ‘la manzana’! I completely understand that this is a bit of a stretch, which is how i’ve come to the conclusion that they aren’t gendered, but derived from them being gendered in whichever language English mainly was derived from. (Also, to expand on grammatical gender being related to identity, it’s similar in Japanese! They always use different ‘I / me’ to refer to themselves, which even gives a slight insight to their personalities! (and also changes depending on who they’re talking to and the vibes they want to give off!) E.g.: 僕 / boku: Is mainly used by men or boys who want to give the more soft or ‘good boy’ energy あたし/atashi : is more often used by women or girls (i don’t really know too much about this one) 俺/ore: is used more by men who want to seem gangster-ish around their close friends! those were just a few examples, i thought it might be fascinating!)
Él has an accent mark on the e, when it refers to the pronoun, which has ella (rhymes with Freya) for she, as its feminine counterpart. El the article (counterpart to la), has no accent mark. Accent marks on 1-syllable words, have nothing to do with pronunciation (as they are used for multi-syllable words to override the standard pattern), but rather they are just there to distinguish homophones. Like si for if, and sí for yes. The él that means he, also means it, when you are talking about a masculine noun, or a noun of an unidentified grammatical gender. Ella would be "it" for a feminine noun.
OH MY GOD I'M SO GLAD SOMEONE MADE THIS VIDEO!!!! People who cite this article and say this shit (despite being PAINFULLY monolingual [which isn't inherently a bad thing, but in this situation it's rather relevant]) and insight that they're right irritate me to no end
And then, at least in Italian, we have words that can change their (grammatical) gender in the plural, like 'il dito' (the finger, masc.) and 'le dita' (the fingers, fem.) and this happens with many other body parts like ears, knees, arms, eyebrows... Some words even have two plurals one fem. and he other masc., but in this case the meaning has different nuances, like 'il muro' (the wall, masc.) and 'i muri' (the walls, of a house, masc.) and 'le mura' (the walls of a castle or city, fem.).
As someone who grew up bilingual English and Spanish and who's been fluent in French over half his life, this is only an issue among monoglot English-speakers who simply have no frame of reference when it comes to grammatical gender, so they erroneously attach all sorts of political baggage to it. The root of the issue is that English has lots of doublets, so we have two words, gender and genre, which essentially mean the same thing but which has taken on a more specific meaning in the former case. In Spanish, there's only one word: _género,_ just as in French there's only _genre._ You have to specify whether it's _género sexual, género gramático, género literario,_ etc.
Nice video, linguistics are weird. In Spanish (in Spain, not talking about LATAM dialects) saying "quiero comprarlo" it's normal, you "want to buy it" but in the places where "laísmo" is not used (some people use "-la" when you shouldn't and it sounds weird and many natives will call out other natives, there's a huge infight) saying "quiero comprarla" translates to "I want to buy her" which can easily be interpreted as wanting to hire a female escort or making a joke about slaves. Just for changing the gender of a verb conjugation. Language is so ingrained onto us that we don't even realize these things, so I don't think that gendered language affects us, mostly because in my autonomous community we speak Basque and Spanish since the childhood, Basque is not gendered but Spanish is, and we don't really mind the gender outside of phonetics
What about dialects around the world? I'm german speaking swiss and here not only it's possible that genders (m/f/n) are being switched = meaning another definite article is used before the noun. But indefinite articles (e/en/es) themselves aren't used to assign gender coherently.
The issue here is that language is a fascinating subject that is generally speaking poorly understood even by specialists. Language also has ties to sociology, history, anatomy, neurology and psychology. The general educated person will happily go to a TED talk where a supposedly competent linguist explains to them a shiny new specious theory. Ms Boroditsky has apparently understood that and is more than willing to cut a few corners to give people the entertainment they seek.
Oh my god fucking finally someone put into words what's been an issue for me about all the faux liguistics from people who barely speak their own language. And very nice to call out that it's the exact people who always say "check your sources" that constantly fail at that and just repeating the same false article from like 20 years ago that was obviously false back then too
super interesting video. small correction: the picture shown at 6:18 is a "Schüssel", as a native German speaker I would really only use "Napf" to refer to a pets/animals bowl not one used by humans
Saying “foreskin” is masculine in German is at best a simplification. The “Die” in “Die Vorhaut” relates to the „Haut“ (skin) part of the word. In German, as you probably know, you can compose arbitrary words by smushing others together, and this is one of them. In English, “foreskin” works the same. However, the gender of a noun is only determined by the last word, in this case skin. So you can create any arbitrary inconsistencies by combining stuff. Like “Frauenhelikopter” to make a nonsensical example. This “woman’s helicopter” is male, but like, that has nothing to do with the “woman” part
As a person whose first, second, and third language are romance, i've always found funny how in one language a word can be femine and masculine in another. La tigre El tigre And even in the same language a man can be hermoso or hermosa depending of the phasing. Él es una persona hermosa. Él es un ser humano hermoso. There are two sexes and gender is a social construct, therefore genders can be infinite. But at the end of the day you were born with a vagina or a pennis, we aren't penguins, we have sexual dimorfism and that can't be ignored. The language is a tool that can be used to differentiate between the two. The intersex people are a very minuscule percentage of the population, so are the mute people.
Technology, Entertainment, Design Not the first time I have noticed that speakers who are meant to Entertain are not vetted for scientific accuracy. Great video and great job of debunking pseudoscientific research. As a native bilingual speaker of Italian + another gendered language I fully agree with the points made in the video. As an aside, because it was brought to my attention, it’s the first time I notice that the days of the week are gendered. Never thought about it before. In Italian they are all masculine except for Sunday. In the other language it’s Sunday and Thursday that are feminine, which sounds rather random. 😅
In Spanish or French, they are translated to: Monday = moon, Tuesday = Mars, Wednesday = Mercury, Thursday = Jupiter, Friday = Venus, Saturday = Saturn, and Sunday = St. Domingue. In German, Sunday is literally translated, and also, Wednesday = middle of the week, and Friday = free day.
Regardless of any studies... In my native language, key and bridge are of masculine gender. And I simply CAN'T IMAGINE how one can use 'soft' or feminine adjectives first when talking about either thing. Both are sturdy objects that are designed to be sturdy, what fragility or intricacy they are talking about?
eyy, I had looked up this same thing for my linguistics 101 class. we were meant to look up something we were interested in, so coming from the tom scott video I thought that would be a interesting thing to cover; and I found basically the same thing you did, that the people who summarize it overshot the implications of the actual studies
Cognitive scientist here. I'm just gonna say this much about Boroditsky: I've been studying under a professor who published a few really impactful papers with her and while she certainly is a researcher with lots of accolades and high profile, her takes are far from being uncontroversial. I remember reading several of her papers in a class under said professor and being assigned with writing essays about her claims (it was more than obvious that my professor was hinting us a the several inconsistencies in her ideas) and I remember a lot of similar points being discussed to what you said in this video. So while you might not be a linguist you certainly have an amazing instinct for scientific and critical thinking. Consider me subscribed.
It's interesting that "Boroditsky" is an example of a SURNAME having grammatical gender. Because of the "-sky" suffix, the surname is masculine and always used for men. A woman with that surname would be Boroditskaja, if I am not mistaken. American government just couldn't accept these gendered surnames at all, and many Slavic people were forced to be born with masculine surnames, much like probably what Boroditsky went through
Masculine version is used as a default form in Russian for any word that can take gender forms including surnames (for example in vocabularies you find masculine versions). Some linguists even argue that feminine and neuter forms are going to get obsolete in several centuries along with the whole gender category within the universal tendency of grammatical simplification of indoeuropean languages.
Yep. The Yanks are especially good at messing with people's names. I once knew an American whose surname was Poe. He told me that his father's surname was Podbir and his father's father's surname had been Podbirisovsky!
One concept that is never brought up in these discussions is that in gendered languages you can still refer to someone in a gender-neutral way even though there is no neutral gender in the language, and so you can be gender-neutral while still using masculine/feminine words. For instance, if you refer to someone using the word "person" it will be gender neutral, but if you're speaking portuguese then the word "pessoa" is feminine, so later on in the sentence you might refer to that person as "she" regardless of gender, because it has to agree with the gender of the word "person", thus a feminine pronoun has been used in a gender-neutral way.
Exactly! Personally, as another Portuguese speaker, I think this is a much better option than using those "proposed" made-up pronouns and adjectives such as 'Pessoe', 'carinhose', 'Elu', 'ótime' 'Elx', 'delx', 'Eli' or 'Amigue' these ideas just change the language completely to a point where it just breaks and completely loses its meaning. Also, another way to refer to someone without using the first pronouns (since that's what piss so many -people- twitter users off) it's just to not use the pronouns at all (when referring to the person). If you're directly talking to the person, you're just using the pronoun "Você" or "Tu" [You], there's no need to change it since it works for any gender. Now, if you want to refer to someone indirectly, just replace the first pronoun with the name of the person or bring up the person's name in the first sentence, so you don't have to repeat it later. Afterwards, the male adjectives can also be used as gender-neutral. Let me give some examples: "Cris disse que iria na loja mais tarde, -ele/ela- também contou que iria passar na sua casa depois" (Cris said that would go in the shop later, -he/she- also told that -he/she- was going to pass by your house later) [not using the pronouns] "Alex é -um homem/uma mulher- uma pessoa muito educada. (Alex is a very polite person -man/woman- ) [using the feminine noun of "educada" because of "pessoa" instead of the name's gender] "Sam, você é muito bom nisso" (Sam, you're very good at this) [although Sam may not identify as a man, "bom" (the male adjective) is used as a neutral to the feminine "boa", which if it was used instead would have implied that Sam would be a woman]
It's the same in German "Person" is feminine and has to be referenced using a feminine pronoun. In a similar vein the word "Mensch"(human being) is masculine
@@ponteirodorato the same in Spanish, you can use their preferred noun instead of a pronoun and you don't have to gender anything else in a sentence outside of adjectives or some nouns which if you put them in masculine it's the neutral noun, but people don't really see that. People are making a fuss about nothing
@@ponteirodorato honestly i also don't like the idea of the made-up pronouns, but using this other form seems so much more of a hastle that it's just better to use the neo pronouns. And, i don't think it breaks the language (besides the already gender neutral words, it's just pointless to change these), it's just a third noun added to the list. Why do you think it's that bad? /Genuine question
The biggest problem with grammatical gender is calling it "grammatical gender" instead of the more precise "noun classes". It confuses people who don't understand how languages work.
@@agun214 Gender and genre are indeed just the English and French spelling of what used to be the exact same word. When grammatical "genders" are referred to as masculine, feminine and neuter, however, then the connotation - certainly in a world not yet having reached the postfeminist stage - is anything but abstract to many people. And that is made into an issue that didn't need to exist if proper terminology had been universally adopted.
Great video on an interesting topic, thank you. As a native German speaker I'd like to add that words can change gender when you add specific suffixes. The diminutive suffix "-chen" /çən/ makes all nouns it is added to neuter. You could take the word "die Katze" (feminine; the cat) which becomes "das Kätzchen" (neuter) or "der Hund" (masculine; the dog) which becomes "das Hündchen" (again, neuter). This can be applied to most nouns (hesitant to say all, there might be exceptions that I’m unaware of). Furthermore, there are words that change meaning based on which gender you use for them. Not many of those exist, but you do come across them from time to time. For example the word "Schild" /ʃɪlt/ can mean "the sign” (in the sense of street signs etc) when neuter (das Schild), or "the shield" (thing used for protection) when masculine (der Schild). So gender really is just a grammatical category that can be influenced by simple suffix-use, or in some cases it helps to avoid ambiguity. I don't think that my perception of gender changes when I put a suffix behind a word, or change its gender for the purpose of clearer understanding
If the word ends in -ch you wouldn't usually add -chen because it makes it very hard to pronounce. It still makes it neuter of course, you just use -lein instead of -chen. So the diminutive of "Bach" is not "Bächchen", it's "Bächlein" (-lein can of course be used for words that don't end in -ch too). It's also why "Mädchen" is neuter.
@@user-es7ui5mc1m true, but not because it makes it harder to pronounce. Adding the diminutive to bach just is pronounced like bächien, which is not hard to pronounce. The real reason is that it is perceived as looking and sounding odd with a lot of words. Bach is arguably one were it still works.
Portuguese can also be gender fluid based on the suffixes attached to the word. The word for _“socks”_, _”small socks”_ and _“big socks”_ are _“a meia”_, _”a meinha”_, and _“o meião”_. Some may say that’s because small is fem while big is masc, but Car is consistently masc (_o carro, o carrão, o carrinho_, for regular, big, and small Car)
This is a fantastic video, probably the best I've seen on grammatical gender. I'm glad someone is keeping tabs on us all when we get things wrong! But since you did use a clip of mine in the video, I hope you'll indulge me as I defend myself a little bit... I think I do overstate Boroditsky's ideas' validity to make the case, I concede that. But I did so in order to really steel-man that argument, assume it was valid, and then say that it wouldn't really matter anyway. The tendency of classifying feminine objects with certain traits would not be a case of grammatical gender shaping how you think, it would be an example of the cultural norms around us (in this case, sexism) infiltrating our language. Grammatical gender, there, would be no more than a conduit. That's more the point I was trying to make. Again though, great video, subscribed and looking forward to more content :)
Hey! Thanks so much! Really glad you enjoyed it. But yes, I responded to someone else who mentioned this, but I wasn't trying to frame you as someone intentionally misleading anybody. Just as an example of how prevalent the myth behind Boroditsky's claims have gotten. Apologies if I came off negatively when bringing you up, I really liked your essay on grammatical gender as well and I think I would categorize it as a similar position to mine.
In German „Geschlecht“ can mean sex/gender but also a (noble) bloodline. It's also used in formulations like „Menschengeschlecht“ (the human race) or „ein frei[es] Geschlecht“ (a free people). Additionally, the Latin word "genus" is also used for classifying animals. So I agree that you could interpret "gender" as generally referring to a group of related things distinguished from other groups.
I feel like a lot of the words that are in English that they describe as “masculine” or “feminine” differ for the most part in their origin. The masculine words “long, big, strong” are Germanic, but “elegant, beautiful, extended” have romance roots. Interesting how that connotation is made…
þis is also sortə þe case wiþ swearwords (if i’m not much mistaken) - my understanding is þat when þe normans did þeir big ol’ invasion , english started using french ( / romance) roots as þe polite / (‘)edible(’) versions , and þe germanic ones as þe crude / animal form - defecate / relieve vs sh\*t / poo(p) poultry vs chicken beef vs cow sex vs f\*ck
@@anterrobang9298 neat way of typing, I probably would have felt like you were too pompous if not for the fact that I was actually able to read what you said and enjoyed the challenge. Vsauce's video "why are bad words bad" goes into detail on what you said, though I have a feeling youve seen it already so this is more for others that read my reply
As an Italian speaker I also find it interesting how English has (or had, until the last few years) adjectives that you would usually attribute to people of a particular gender. For example, "handsome" and "beautiful". To me every adjective can go with every noun, just make the noun/adgective genders match, as said in the video, mostly for musicality
This is still very much the case: a 'handsome woman' and a 'beautiful boy' have very specific, and highly nuanced meanings. Broadly speaking: if you hear *anyone* using either term;- stay away from them.
@@chrisoneill3999"Beautiful" is an adjectives often used by English speakers to describe both males and females since it's literal definition is "pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically". "Handsome" has two meanings: 1. (of a man) good-looking. 2. (of a number, sum of money, or margin) substantial. ~ Oxford Dictionary. So yeah, "Handsome woman" sounds a little strange, but "beautiful boy" is not.
From reading a lot of 19th century novels “handsome woman” was used for older and or married women. Rarely for young women and I don’t remember ever seeing it associated with girls. Not being a native speaker I am not sure if the nuance applies today.
Thank you!!!! As a linguist and Spanish speaker this has always driven me crazy because it feels so counterintuitive and completely unrelated how I actually use gender when I speak Spanish. Monolingual English speakers will make the most wild baseless claims about features not present in English and act like it's totally crazy and weird when in reality it's easily explained by other things that are just like, core processes of language.
Same way I feel about cases. English speakers going nuts about how there are so many cases in an XY language, but it's the same thing as using a bunch of prepositions.
@@carkawalakhatulistiwayeah, sure buddy. Try translating "la diferencia entre el mar y la mar" and let me know how your genderless language needs a paragraph to convey a similar enough idea.
I also found how, at least in my gendered language, the primary progressive thought is not to eliminate gendered words (like in English), but instead to create new "femenitives", female gendered words used to describe, for example, professions that used to be considered stereotypically male.
@@YA_LUNNAYA_PONIYep, it seems to be happening in some languages. Yet it’s a pretty dumb reason tbh. Just like the video says, these are two groups, not actually genders. But if it makes the speakers think they’re being more progressive then they should just go for it. Language is ever changing and changing a few grammatical genders is not the end of the world. It’s just sorta unnecessary.
@@Luis-fd2bi but doesn't it sound clanky to use "[male noun] [female verb]"? "водитель (он/его) поехала (она/ее)"? even that i think is a good reason also in russian (which is most likely the language they're talking about) there's already a ton of feminine nouns that were made from male nouns: студентка, барыня, попадья, пионерка, комсомолка, водительница... it's not something new, people are just trying to make this rule apply to more words there's also masculatives such as швей (man who sews, from швея (woman who sews, she/her)) and балерин (male ballet dancer, from балерина (ballerina, female ballet dancer, she/her)) so its not one-sided
Yeah, it does. As an NB it makes you very conscious of the fact that in your language there's no way to use non-gendered words when talking about yourself. Like, you say "I was going to..." and you already have to gender yourself as either masc or fem
the whole thing about native speakers of gendered languages is so funny to me, I was in french class one time, and my classmates said "god I'm happy danish doesn't have grammatical gender" even though it VERY MUCH DOES, it's just not called masculine and feminine, even though the common-neuter distinction danish does have works in the exact same way as more "traditional" nomenclature for grammatical gender. Safe to say when I explained that danish indeed did have grammatical gender they didn't believe me, until one of them looked it up and saw I was right.
Though to be honest, as an anglophone who learnt both Danish and French in school, Danish just being straight forward and calling its grammatical genders "en" words and "et" words, depending on if their article is "en" or "et", just made everything so much simpler to understand! At least compared to learning French and being weirded out by the concept that words can be "masculine" or "feminine". Danish just gets straight to the point 😂
@@Respectable_Username @acatwithahatt7999 You're both right. As a native Danish speaker I didn't think about the Danish grammatical genders as "genders" and was equally confused/frustrated when I started learning "really gendered" languages. Of course, they are all (grammatically) gendered - also Danish. Many Danish speakers just don't think about it that way. So it kind of helps to not get into the "grammatical gender = gender" trap when you just don't use that word. En-words and Et-words don't make you think "what does this have to do with boys and girls"?
I think the different choice of adjectives between cultures has more to do with the image these words provoke. In my very biased german brain, when i heard bridge i immediatly thought of a steel bridge. Because those are waayy more common here. (I suppose the old bridges were mostly blown up in a war of your choice) ...steel bridges are way more sleek or elegant in their design....thats the point of using steel after all. They should be elegant architecture and (if you are into that) Something beautiful Spain from what i know still has more old and sturdy stone bridges so the spanish speakers might have thought of other bridges then the germans. (Conjecture on my part) With keys i am unsure but we don't really have these "old-style" keys anymore. I've rarely ever seen them. And the only times i've seen more "beautiful" keys was in hostels/airbnbs in romance countries like italy and spain. ...but this is of course only anecdotal evidence. I can only say that ~1% of germans would think of these "beautiful" keys when hearing the word.
I am Spanish fron Galicia. A bridge is " un puente " in Spanish , but in some poethry old songs and old writting you can also find " la puente " . In galician it is allways femenine " a ponte " as in Portuguese , the same bridge at one side of the border in Huelva , in Andalussia is " el puente " and you jump to the other side and it is " a ponte ".
As a native Italian speaker, that "study" about bridges and keys always made me cuckle thinking about masculine nouns that become feminine as plurals in Italian (l'uovo/le uova, il braccio/le braccia etc), and how those would totally mess with the study's premises and conclusions LMAO
The same thing happens in German, all nouns get the "feminine" article in plural, although the verbs and adjectives surrounding them have their own unrelated plural forms. It doesn't seem like the study took that into account anyway
@@alexperper6390in Italian they end in -a just like the Latin, neutral nouns from which they derive. Ovum, ova in Latin become uovo, uova in Italian. The fact that plural eggs are considered feminine in Italian may be more proof that "genderization" of nouns is made by sound association. On the other hand though, this got me thinking about words from non-gendered languages that are used in gendered languages. In Italian we say "il mouse" as in "the mouse" (m.) because mouse is topo and topo is masculine, I guess? But then how does the "sound association" theory work with that? There's no final vowel in "mouse", which should be what's causing the gender association, according to this theory. I hope OP reads me - they've done a great job with this video and hope they have more info on this.
In russian there is not only neutral(or middle) gender, but also general(unspecefied) gender. Job titles are general gender for example, but they follow rules of their phonetic gender. So in russian sentence with femine actor, femine adjective musculine job title and musculine adjective is gramatically correct. Example: Девушка умная - врач замечательный.
You did a really great job with this video Yuval! As a native Spanish speaker I think you made a really great point when saying that having gendered words doesn’t mean we actually see those things as the assigned “gender” ( I say “gender” because I don’t think that “una puerta (a door)” is a woman, it’s just a word with feminine gender, which is different from the social gender). Sometimes I see masculine words as gender neutral things. If I have to personify something as the days of the week (all masculine in Spanish) I would imagine them in a more gender neutral way, because they are just days and not men or women. Also, just to add another example to this point 17:37 there are masculine personifications of feminine words in Spanish . LA muerte (death) is a feminine word that tends to be represented with masculine traits or seen as more masculine. Or EL amor (love), a masculine word that tends to be represented either with a boy (Cupid) or a women ( making a reference to the Greek goddess Venus).
This a great video! I feel like the whole idea of this study is very english-centric, the ideas presented only make sense if explained in a language like English which has only one grammatical gender and people are left to assign gender to words strictly based on cultural context. I speak Polish which has three grammatical genders, if I'm going to describe feminine noun as "strong" then I have to use a feminine version of that adjective because in order to sound natural an adjective has to follow the grammatical gender of the noun it's describing. In Polish I could describe a tower as beautiful and strong ("piękna i mocna wieża") and in my mind I used two feminine adjectives to describe a feminine noun, by the time someone translates it to English they might think that I used a one feminine and one masculine adjective to describe a masculine noun. Which brings me to another issue with this which is that translation is not just changing words one for one. Polish has a handful of words that depending on the context could be translated into English as "strong". When talking about a person in most contexts it makes more sense to use the word "silny" (fem. silna) which is strong as in able to lift a lot, when talking about a bridge I would probably us the word "mocny" which also translates as strong but as in well build and resistant to damage. So if the conversation is about how the grammatical gender of nouns affects our use of adjectives the conversation needs to be about the exact adjectives used in the language they were used in and the culture that speaks that language, not the English translation of it. If this study had something to reveal about how language affects our thinking then well... it all got lost in translation 😎
One example of how our thinking influences grammatical gender: In German, girl (Mädchen) is neuter because the diminutive always is. So a "correct" sentence would be: The girl and it's dog (Das Mädchen und sein Hund) but the neuter possessive coincides with the masculine. So most people say: The girl and her dog (Das Mädchen und ihr Hund).
In Polish, KOPCIUSZEK "Cinderella" has masculine gender and MYSZKA MIKI "Mickey Mouse" has feminine gender. If that "cognitive researcher" (with all her partial claims) knew that we call an adolescent girl coming out of childhood (between twelve and sixteen years of age) as PODLOTEK (which is a masculine word), she would probably claim that Poles think that children are born without gender (we also have neuter -Ę for 'young', so DZIEWCZĘ 'a young girl" is neuter) but then there is some transfiguration that change all them in males and with menstruation some of them became females ;) [Even while writing it, it sound like BS that, that person with a Slavic surname claimed - she obviously never heard about Slovene language, in which it is "a common phenomenon that some nouns switch gender either when declining or in all cases altogether, depending on the declension, dialect, and case. In formal contexts, the change occurs in plural, while the dialectal changes occur more sporadically" ;)]
As a native speaker of a gendered language, I also don't think we think about the grammatical gender of nouns when we speak. I still remember how surprised I was as a little kid to learn in school that nouns have genders. That was something that hadn't even crossed my mind until I heard it in school. I remember how ecstatic I was to tell my mom that this noun is a girl and this noun is a boy and so on... Obviously that's nonsense. Grammatical gender and gender have next to nothing to do with each other.
you already had known about that cuz without that you couldn't use it. That's not excactly how normal genders work so you just didnt know how to name it
Then why were things like spirits, the Holy Ghost, mythical creatures you can barely make out, abstract concepts, etc. given gender? Not to mention inanimate objects in languages 📜. @@kazekagekid
One thing I believe people need to know is that GRAMMATICAL "gender" is not the same as human SOCIAL "gender". They are often conflated because they use the same word. However, the "gender" in "grammatical gender" basically just means an arbitrary category. It just happens to be that the most popular languages that have this property have at least two grammatical genders named "masculine" and "feminine", mostly Indo-European and Afroasiatic languages. We could hypothetically rename the masculine gram.gender as "Noun class 1" and the feminine gram.gender as "Noun class 2" and there would be less confusion. Bantu languages are often described as having noun classes even if they work the same as grammatical gender just because they have more than ten and are not limited to "masculine" and "feminine". One of my favorite basic examples of this is that 'girl' is neuter (gram.gender) but of course, is semantically female. While some objects like 'water' in Spanish can change their gram.gender depending on context. It would be less confusing if we described as Noun class 3 or whatever and as changing from Noun class 1 to 2.
As a Hebrew speaker, whenever someone talks abt gendered language, I think about the fact there is dumb shit like ביצה (egg)(pronounced beytza) being feminine but ביצים (eggs)(propounded beytzim) ends in ים )im) which is the masculine ending for plural and three are many more (שולחן, כיסא,נעליים...) wnd no one talks abt it!
Great video! Your style of teaching translates really well into longer format video essays. I personally would love to see more content like this from you. Also, I've never realized how funny your TikToks are out of context. Got a good laugh out of me.
The russian language does technically have rules for telling the grammatical gender, as I eventually learned from a book; but we were never taught these rules in school or from parents, it's just something most of us understand naturally. But I do have to point out something. While the grammatical gender of a word is just the gender of a word... When it comes to fairytales, wher3 you can have fantasy creatures, or inanimate objects come to life, then the grmmatical gender actually becomes real gender in such stories. For example, the word Смерть (Death) is female. So if Death is an actual character in a fairytale, she would be female in Russian; and I find it weird to see Death refered to as He in english stories. Owl becaome female in the russian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh, because the word Сова has grammatical female gender. Волшебник is male, and Волшебница is female, both meaning Wizard. However, Ведьма (Witch) is always female, and I don't think there's an equivalent. I've actually seen several times, particularly in the Nintendo fandom, where people see witches like Gruntilda and Cackletta, and are unsure if it's a boy or a girl, and I'm always like - well, duh, you can clearly tell that's a female character from it being called a witch. (Not to mention, the name ends with the letter A, which, while not always, typically happens if female names in Russian, and thus immedietly makes me think that the name belongs to a female character). And by the way, as far as verbs having gender, our verbs have gender, but only in the past tense. So in present and future tense, the verb sounds the same, but in past tense - it would have to match with the grammatical gender of the word it belongs to.q
This applies to Ukrainian as well It's annoying when a word ends with а або о but doesn't match female or male, and is instead the other way around. Idk it's kinda hard to learn so many different forms of words, and having so many different classifications for different use cases.
as a native german speaker i've always doubted that study. i feel like grammatical gender is a second thought and, as you said, grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender. native speakers don't really think about the grammatical gender (not even subconsciously i feel like) which is why i think saying that it affects your perception on certain objects is completely wrong
God thank you so much for this video. I watched that Boroditsky Ted Talk some time ago and was astonished at how everyone in the comments was like “wow this is so interesting and true” and nobody was calling her out on it. As a Spanish speaker, if I think about a “key” I just think about how it’s metallic and I hate touching metal cause it makes my skin crawl lmao. Nothing about it being feminine or delicate. I agree with everything you said👍🏻
I remember watching that Ted Talk I thought it was plausible and didn't think much of it. It's interesting to find out that it wasn't true. So you have grammatical gender but the gender isn't really a gender it's more like a device between different kinds of words. Do you know what the purpose of these genders is?
@@avivastudios2311 exactly, i would say we only notice gender when it applies to people or animals (el profesor - the male teacher ; la profesora - the female teacher). For objects, the grammatical gender doesn’t have any implications of meaning. I wouldn’t say it has an intrinsic purpose as languages aren’t created but rather they just happen and develop naturally, but the most practical “purpose” when we communicate is easing ambiguities. Imagine we’re talking about 2 things (a flower, in Spanish female, and a watch, in Spanish male), and I say “Give it to me” In English, you would need to ask: “the flower or the watch?” but in Spanish you would already know cause female “it” is “la” and male “it” is “lo”. So the main purpose I would say is making communication faster & more efficient. Same way as English probably has some features that also achieve an efficient communication that Spanish doesn’t. All languages are different but efficient in their own ways :)
I participated in a psych student's version of this study (as an English speaker in a made up language) and completely messed up the data. Part of the "made-up language" section of the experiment was memorizing the "genders" of several words, so when we got to the "similarity" section of the experiment, I thought it was more of the memorization, and thus marked several words as "similar" to men and women because I remembered that they were classified with that gender.
As a Castillian speaker who studies linguistics ¡Thank you y muchísimas gracias amigo! Even here amongst people of my country we've started to have these perceptions of language brought over by people who do not speak our language and it has caused many people to overthink things that honestly, we should just not think that much about. Grammatical Gender is just that, categories that happened to have man, woman or something else as the most defining one. Also, on a note: in language families it is very common for what you described with the e, o and the combinations of consonants or vowels, specially in indo-european where e and o served the same purpose, to conjugate the specific gender of something.
@@faziarry Not really, as Castilian refers to European Spanish, whereas the Spanish spoken in other Spanish-speaking countries are slightly different, but we usually don't call that Spanish "Castilian". For example, Castilian uses vosotros for the plural form of you in a familiar setting that uses 2nd-person plural verb conjugations, whereas Latin America always uses ustedes (3rd-person plural) no matter the situation for the plural form of you. Another thing is that Castilian uses the present perfect conjugation (haber + past participle) for past-tense verbs, whereas Latin America uses the preterite more.
@@bourbon2242 Not really, as Castilian refers to European Spanish, whereas the Spanish spoken in other Spanish-speaking countries are slightly different, but we usually don't call that Spanish "Castilian". For example, Castilian uses vosotros for the plural form of you in a familiar setting that uses 2nd-person plural verb conjugations, whereas Latin America always uses ustedes (3rd-person plural) no matter the situation for the plural form of you. Another thing is that Castilian uses the present perfect conjugation (haber + past participle) for past-tense verbs, whereas Latin America uses the preterite more.
Lera Boroditsky comes from Belarus, a slavic languages speaking country, Russian, Belarussian, Polish and Ukrainian are the most common ones. These laguages recognize the grammatical "gender". You see, all nouns in these laguages have it, and derivatives of nouns like surnames have it as well. Her surname written in English, "Boroditsky", is in masucline gender according to any slavic language grammar. There is a tradition in the Unite States to switch feminine slavic last names to masculine, most likely because women who get married take the last names of their husbands. Funnily enough, if you go to her wiki page and switch the laguage to Russian it would list 2 versions of her last name - "f. Бородицкая (Boroditskaya)" and "m. Бородицки (Boroditski)".
I’ve been trying to learn Ukrainian and find it overwhelming how everything is gendered. My native language doesn’t have grammatical gender at all, let alone as much as Ukrainian.
As an Italian speaker, I don’t think the genders of the words ever affected the way I think about them. Every word has a gender so you don’t really think much of it. Maybe English speakers, while learning a language like Italian, would think about it since it’s something new but with a native speaker that probably won’t happen. Plus there are words that have a gender in the singular form and the other in the plural form so the experiments wouldn’t really hold at that point
I feel like if the experiment only included people who aren’t native speakers of a gendered language, then there would be a higher correlation of the object being labeled male or female just because they are thinking whether it is a feminine or masculine word. If the experiment only included people native to their gendered language, then I predict that there would be little to no correlation of them picking male or female based on its grammatical gender.
A lot of people don't seem to realise that the word gender just means category. It comes from the latin _genus_ which means family. I recommend reading about the etymology of different words, it's really interesting to understand a bit more about how our languages came to be. :)
Great video! FYI Norwegian 'kvinne' isn't really masculine, at least not in the way presented here. It's just that feminine and masculine nouns in Norwegian Bokmål can be optionally grouped together as common gender. This has to do with Bokmål effectively having two interacting grammatical gender systems: a three gender-system with masculine, feminine and neuter, which has its origin in the system found in native Norwegian dialects, and a Danish-like system where only common gender and neuter are distinguished. So it's not that 'kvinne' is optionally masculine, it's just that you don't have to distinguish the feminine from the masculine. Dictionaries often list common gender as just 'masculine' as the endings for the two are the same, which can be misleading. Hope this clarifies things!
A note: The origin of the word gender is from Latin, wherein the word meant literally "type / kind", which is why we use the concept to describe human sexual dimorphism and to group similar sounding words together.
I want to thank you so much for making such an in-depth video about the flip side of this very tropey topic. I am not sure why people today are so eager to go back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even after we've already disproven it.
We literally do. Using a descriptivist lens the word gender is synonymous with the word sex for the vast majority of people. The redefining of the word emanating from narrow disciplines under the liberal arts umbrella which has been forced onto many doesn’t undo that.
@@colecalame5815by that argument as long as enough people accept that gender and sex are different things then that becomes true regardless of why it happens.
As Freud said, a banana is sometimes is just a banana. Although my language has grammatical gender, I don't think of a bridge as a man (it's masculine). I DO NOT PERSONIFY objects, unless in very special circumstances. It's just a bridge, not a human I might want to have sex with.
As a Turkish speaker my language is genderless so I have always found this consept very interesting. I didn't questioned English at all but when I started studying Arabic and German at the same time, I got curious and thought about that bridge study thing a lot which confused me a lot. This video helped me to understand better, thank you.
I love watching video essays, and you did great on this one. I hope you do more stuff like this. Also, I feel calling a boat a "She" makes sense, they are strong and sturdy but also elegant and beautiful. Although you can use "He" or "She," I believe people tend to label objects based on their appearance, and being elegant and beautiful is particularly noticeable for most people (at least in my opinion).
@@JonahNelson7 I think most vehicules are called she because of traditional masculinity. If you take the most cliché, traditional, (sexist) nuclear family you can imagine, easy to see the man, the father, seeing his car/boat/motorbike as something he owns, he loves, he has an intimate relationship, is a prized posession and an exteriorisation of his masculity (car dude, biker, sailor : very masculine archetypes.) In those ways, the vehicule can ressemble a wife or daughter, so boom, she ("She's a beauty ain't she ?). I wouldn't immedialty go "she" for a bicycle like I would for a car, motobike or ship, probably because it's less associated with those very traditional, very masculine archetypes.
boats being "elegant and beautiful" is entirely subjective saying that "oh it only makes sense" is worthless because it makes sense to YOU (and probably the culture you grew around), not everyone
Good essay! I'm glad you covered it at all, but I think you should've put more stress on this: so-called grammatical gender *isn't* gender -- at all. The word originally used was genus, which means: 'type, family, kind'. 'Grammatical gender' is simply a classification, for example of nouns in languages like German or Spanish. While there is a certain correlation between non-linguistic human behaviour and grammatical nominal classification, this is a phenomenon you can observe in semantics everywhere: that real-life objects your words denote may influence the way you speak about them. Thus, while (to my knowledge) women and men will fit their 'grammatical gender' in most 'gendered' languages, this is not a feature of gendered languages but of language referencing extralinguistic realities.
Well explained! I speak 2 different gendered languages natively and I've NEVER thought about the gender of gender words! And i am sure >90% of people out there don't!
A Bulgarian speaker here (3 genders - masculine, feminine and neuter)! I just want to say that when I was still learning English in school, quite often I would refer to a specific object using a personal pronoun in the gender of the object in Bulgarian. So, for example: "Yesterday I bought a new house. She has two floors...". This mistake was not exclusive to my speaking abilities, but also to my peers'. So I guess genders of concepts and objects stick with you for a long time, and still, now that I am aware of that, whenever I try to "feel" the gender of a random object without thinking about it in Bulgarian and translating the word, my feeling never lets me down
Same with me, I am Slovakian and some people on the internet went as far as telling me I am misogynistic because I assumed somebody is "he", while in Slovak the gender for person is masculine. I feel like English natives should give us a break and they should stop overthinking BS.
yeah, so gender in words is never taught in Mexico, even in Spanish lessons, around age 6 to 8 they make you form sentences as an exercise, but the focus is mostly on conjugation and identifying the parts of the sentence (Subject, Verb, adverb, etc.) No one messes the pronouns because it just rolls with the tongue, this is a thing you learn before even fully understand what gender even is.
I would like to add on, that the word for ocean in German can NOT ONLY be masculine or feminine it can ALSO be neutral with "das Meer" (which is also actually the most common way to refer to it in normal everyday speech) so it can be: "das Meer" and "der Ozean" AS WELL AS "die See"
And there is "der See", which means "the lake", which is why the Caspian Lake is mistranslated to English as the Caspian Sea, similar to how we pronounce the "W" in words that were translated from German, such as "Wagner", from Russian Baгнep, which then gets translated to German as "Wagner", and then when translated to English, people started pronouncing it with a W sound, rather than a V sound, and don't get me started on how we pronounce "Ludwig" as well.
Your body part point is very true. La bite always throws me. In defence of German on die Vorhaut, that´s not a fair point. Die Haut (a more generic noun) is feminine, and with compound nouns the gender is always that of the final noun. Any skin anywhere is feminine.
I'm German and I'm speaking German in my day-to-day but also English in most of my free time, and I've done so for about 25 years. I can confidently say that when I speak and think in English I'm not mentally associating words to genders at all. "I've lost my key on the bridge" does not prompt my mind to think or feel "I've lost the masculine on the feminine". Even when speaking and thinking in German it's not really like that. I would say the vast majority of gendered objects are just learned. You probably know the feeling when you started using a proper name for a thing because somebody happens to have named it that way and only much later do you notice that you've never even thought about why it has that name, you just learned it that way. There are even words with a grammatical gender I would say goes fundamentally against how they feel. "Der Schmetterling" is the butterfly and is masculine, but never has any butterfly felt masculine to me.
As a Romanian native speaker, I always assumed the thin and low (female and male) voices are the definition of grammatical gender. That was the answer I lived by.
The Wagen (m) - Auto (n) - Karre (f) and Fraß (m) - Essen (n) - Speise (f) triads are quite interesting: In each case, the three words refer to the same thing, but with different connotations. 'Wagen' (m) sounds quite plush, and so does 'Speise' (f), while 'Karre' (f) and 'Fraß' (m) are colloquial and more or less derogatory. The neutrum words are most frequently used and non-evaluative in both cases.
As much as I love Tom Scott, that particular video always gave me doubts (as someone with a profession in languages). Now I see how Boroditsky's assumptions have had an impact that is to be taken with a lump of salt.
I absolutely loved the video. Thank you. As a person who speaks five languages (Ukrainian, Russian, German, Spanish and English), four of which are gendered, I would say that grammatical genders did not really influence my perception. It is actually interesting that amongst the speakers of the Ukrainian language there is an issue with genders because of the influence of Russian. For instance, pain in Russian is боль (feminine), but in Ukrainian it’s біль (masculine). But since the USSR the Ukrainian speakers often perceive pain as feminine using feminine conjugation of adjectives and verbs. It doesn’t mean, however, that Ukrainians used to associate pain with men in the past, and now suddenly chose to associate it with women, because it is absurd. These claims about the correlation between grammatical gender and perception are inconsistent to say the least.
Totally! Also in Ukrainian the same way to refer to the “gender” of words is not called *gender* but birthplace, рід. It helps when you think about it because there is not a connection between the ideas of man and woman but rather the place where the words originated from. English speakers take notes!!!
Yep, in Russian there are long(длинный) for musculine, long(длинная) for feminine and long(длинное) for middle(I don't think calling this gender neutral because it IS a gender and can be confused with unspecified(general) gender).
it's interesting how even tho russian and ukranian are very closely related languages with very similar words, some words are still masculine in one and feminine in the other. the same thing happens with spanish and portuguese, for example "o leite" and "la leche" both mean milk, they have the same etymological roots and almost the same pronunciation but in portuguese it's masculine and in spanish it's feminine
I don’t know Ukrainian, but in Polish there are few words that may describe pain: ból - masculine, cierpienie - neutral, boleść/bolesność - feminine. So it´s another example how gender is attached to word and not to concept. In plural they are all non-masculine (apart from male humans everything is non-masculine in plural form).
A funny case happens with our anthem here in Brazil, the Brazilian National Anthem, sung in Portuguese. Throughout the anthem, Brazil is associated with the attributes of a woman: By having a bosom at the first stanza: "Em teu *seio,* ó liberdade, [...]" [In thy bosom, O Freedom, ...] and in the second: " "Nossa vida" no teu *seio* "mais amores." " ["Our life" in thy bosom "more loves."] (Which by the way, is under quotation because it was taken from another poem, also, a funny thing is the word 'seio' in here, which Yuval briefly mentions at 4:11) And also being referred as a gentle mother to her sons (the people of the country) in the chorus: "[...] *Dos filhos deste solo és mãe gentil;* Pátria amada, Brasil" [... Of the sons of this soil; Thou art kind mother; Beloved fatherland, Brazil] and at the end of the second stanza: "Mas, se ergues da justiça a clava forte; Verás que *um filho teu* não foge à luta; Nem teme, quem te adora, a própria morte." [But if thou raisest the strong gavel of justice; You'll see that *a son of yours* don't flee from battle; Nor do those fear, who loves you, their own death." Despite this, we never refer to Brazil as "A Brasil" in the feminine, but as "O Brasil", using the masculine article, this is because Brasil is a masculine noun. Also, note the "Pátria" in the chorus, literally translates to "Fatherland", the meaning of FATHERland is kept in portuguese. The word apparently comes from the latin 'Patris', which comes from 'Pater', means father. Still, the word is a feminine noun, so it's referred to as "A Pátria", not "O Pátria", it would just sound strange, and this happens because of this rule explained right here in 5:25 Also, in both stanzas of the anthem, Brazil is briefly referred with masculine adjectives: At the end of the first stanza is "Gigante pela própria natureza; És belO, és forte, impávido colosso; E o teu futuro espelha essa grandeza [...]" [Giant by thine own nature; Thou art beautiful, strong, a fearless colossus; And thy future mirrors that greatness ...] and in the second stanza: "DeitadO eternamente em berço esplêndido; Ao som do mar e à luz do céu profundo [...]" [Eternally lying on splendid cradle; To the sound of sea and under deep sky light ...] Joaquim Osório Duque-Estrada, the writer of our anthem, could have used the feminines "Bela" and "Deitada", but he probably chose the masculine nouns due to how it sounds combined with "impávidO colossO", since there is no such a thing like a "ColossA". And also because, at the end of the day, it probably won't really make that much difference, we're talking about a country after all, the meaning of the anthem remains the same even if it briefly uses both masculine and feminine forms: Brazil is a country that act just like a gentle mother to her people, and because of this, her sons would do anything to protect their mother(land), even if it means losing their lives.
@@allejandrodavid5222 Obrigado. Apesar do Brasil estar cheio de problemas intermináveis, o hino nacional além de ser uma carta de amor, é um desejo otimista de esperança para o Brasil. Tem uma parte que eu gosto muito do hino que é "E diga o verde-louro dessa flâmula, paz no futuro e glória no passado" Se for parar para pensar, isso não é o que o verde da bandeira significa, ela foi usada porquê representa a Casa de Bragança, uma família Portuguesa. Porém, o autor do poema altera o significado dessa cor na bandeira, transformando esse símbolo europeu em uma mensagem otimista. E eu acredito que isso foi feito de propósito, o verde está em todo lugar, na natureza, nos esportes, nas bandeiras, nas culturas, e não para. Ele alterou o significado do verde na bandeira para que toda vez que você olhasse para essa cor se lembrasse desse verso, da mensagem que ele passa e não consegue ser mais clara: "Paz no futuro e glória no passado" Prosperidade e tranquilidade para frente. Conquistas, vitórias e guerras no passado, nos livros de história e na memória. Ele tenta focar de forma que lembra para que o futuro do país não repita os erros cometidos no passado. Independente das ideias, origens, culturas, etnias e conflitos de cada filho, a mãe-gentil como um símbolo acolhe todos, biológicos ou adotivos. Mas infelizmente, suas mãos são governadas por outros, que como descreve Chico Buarque em Vai Passar, "engana a pátria mãe distraída e cega os seus filhos que andam perdidos"
7:56 it recently happened in Portuguese! Words ending in "-agem" are feminine (ex: A filmagem, A carruagem, A passagem). "Personagem" (character) was also feminine, but since we started calling "O personagem" for masculine characters, the Linguistic Authorities declared this usage as acceptable, even tho it doesn't follow the "-agem" rule.
Also, in French and Spanish, they are all male with the "-age" and "aje" suffix, such as "le voyage", and "el viaje", but in Portuguese, they are female with "a viagem", however, there exists direct exceptions that seem like they came from Portuguese, such as "l'image (f)", and "la imagen", from "a imagem".
As a portuguese, yes, I do think of dress aka "vestido" as masculine. It is not related at all to being associated with men or women more, but it also doesn't give any significant meaning to the object, it just makes me think of them slightly differently. Like I said in another comment, for me it's about contrast in pairs. Dress is masculine, but skirt is feminine. and it feels right to have a pair like that, one long for more serious occasions and one short and cute. But in reality, you can use dresses cutely and casually, and I know that, but from this pair I instinctively think of dresses as formal first. And these pairs of masculine/feminine make me think of the other word. If you say dress, I also think of skirt. Same goes for: - Shirt (f) / jacket (m) - pants (f) / shorts (m) - walls (f) / ceiling and floor (m) - chair (f) / bench and stool (m) - van, scooter, bike (f) / car, bus, train, airplane (m) - house (f) / building (m) These last few examples show something interesting too. Yes gendered objects don't impact our way of thinking in extreme ways, but why are they that gender to begin with? The fact is that there *is* a contrast being transmitted between a small and cute house, and a building, when speaking portuguese, because language evolved to trasmit that. Same for cars and scooters. And even though vans are bigger than cars, it makes me think of family and summer trips because it is feminine in portuguese. I would like to know if other gendered language users with different genders for these words have different perspectives on this. Also, publications not being published and parts being removed is so common, and most times the reasons are bureaucratic, so that doesn't mean much in my opinion. tl;dr: I think the study is overblown for sure, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's completely false. For me it creates contrasts and pairs between objects. It just depends on the person honestly.
really interesting video. I kind of believe that due to the way these grammatical classes are named, they are unintentionally perceived as having gendered characteristics by the learners of languages that have such systems. when you actually start disassociating the "gender" from the word itself, you start grasping the native-like way of thinking. like, for example, I'm a native Turkish speaker and Turkish is notably gender-neutral, there's no grammatical gender, there are no articles, there's only one 3rd person singular/plural pronoun, etc. however, that doesn't take away the fact that the society itself is extremely patriarchal and very misogynistic. furthermore, I'm also fluent in French and when I first started learning French, I was like "why is ruler female? what do you mean bread is male??? that doesn't even make any sense!" then I got used to it, and the gendered way of thinking slowly faded away. that's why I kinda wish that people would forego using the term "gender" when talking about grammar to avoid confusion and having people draw such misaligned conclusions. yeah, it was useful back then, when one of the most apparent ways of making 2- (or 3-) way distinctions was using the most in-your-face characteristic, i.e. gender (while also casually slapping "neuter" for the 3rd one), even though back in PIE (proto-Indo-European) days, the classification was made based on animacy. then things got more complex, languages, people and societies evolved and it went all haywire. but now, we can just let it go and use a new term. like, "class" maybe (yeah, I know it already exists but it's more of a technical term, not the commonplace one)? anyways, I've rambled on for too long. thank you for reading my TED talk and hope you all have a lovely day. don't forget to rehydrate yourself.
In German, grammatical gender is "Genus", and gender is "Geschlecht". It's less ambiguous this way, and I think English should just start calling grammatical genders word classes or simply use the Latin word genus like German does.
@@vickypedia1308It’s the same in Polish, we call it „rodzaj” which is genus/kind, same as in biological classifications. In fact we don’t have word for gender, it’s usually referred to as „płeć społeczna” - social sex.
I'll keep a running list of any translation errors that people notice here.
4:13 - "Kvinne" isn't masculine in the same way as the others. Norwegian has 3 genders (masculine/feminine/neuter) but the masculine/feminine distinction in Norwegian is often grouped together as the "common" gender, and many dictionaries will list words with "common" gender as Masculine or as Masculine-Feminine.
5:05 - Eye should be masculine in French & Italian.
5:10 - Glass (the material) in Russian is neuter so the square should be gray. I mixed it up with a drinking glass.
6:18 - "Napf" & "Schüssel" seem to refer to two distinct things. "Napf" being a bowl for animals (straight walls) and "Schüssel" being a hemispherical bowl.
6:26 - "Auto" and "Essen" should be swapped.
17:48 - "Time" in Arabic is وقت. The word I have up there is the word for "second", but luckily they're both masculine.
17:55 - “Love” in French should be masculine. It's feminine in the plural.
19:06 - The word סכרנות is supposed to be spelled סקרנות.
19:08 - Death (מוות) should be masculine.
19:18 - “Sacré bleu” as a swear is written as “sacrebleu.”
I took out the part about "Das Bridge" because I've gotten confirmation that it was just straight up wrong. Thanks to everyone for the corrections!
I believe "Das Bridge" in German refers to the card game, not the architectural bridge.
Also, matschik(ah) is an adjective not a noun! :)
@@theavodkado actually מצחיק is the present tense conjugation of להצחיק (to amuse)! Making it both an adjective *and* a verb
5:06 shoe in russian can be both masculine (ботинок) and feminine (обувь)
And glass is always neutral
@@dasha_in_vibeglass as a material is neutral
glass as a container is masculine
Someone described gramatical gender this way once and I love it; They're similar to how we consider colors hot and cold. Red is a hot color, but if I touch a red pencil, I do not expect it to be warmer than the blue pencil.
Weirdly, though, the cool colours are hot and the hot colours cool, in terms of actual science. I've never understood this terminology.
red is hot because in natural environment, you always see full red color as shining hot dangerous object in mostly situation and also summer where is hot has more hot colors like red, yellow. Winter has something different, white snow and so on
I think it's because fire and the sky in hot days are usually red-yellow-orange, while ice and cold days are usually blueish (I don't know why green is a cool color, though)
@@stephenspackman5573Basically, the color you see is based on the frequency of the light wave that hits your eye (light is not exactly a wave, but just bear with me), with red being the lowest and violet the highest frequency (this is why burning metal is red, the light it was emmiting gained more frequency and stepped from infrared to visible light, starting at the lowest point), and the energy of a photon is higher the higher the frequency (E=hf; you can search "photon energy" on Google for more information), so a "colder" color actually carries more energy, which dissipates into more heat.
isnt that because warm colors are also the colors of the sun or fire and cool colors the color of water (not really but we perceive it as blue) or ice (same as water)
Using the word "gender" in grammar is a little bit less weird in french, just because the word for "gender" is "genre", which basically means "category" or "kind".
It's also used for music, books, movies, etc. It was borrowed in English in that context (music genre / book genre / movie genre).
So basically, in french, a gender for people is just a kind of person just as a movie genre is just a kind of movie. And a grammatical gender is just a kind of word. Makes more sense.
yeah, exactly, we just say "type" in Polish so feminine type and masculine type
Exactly the same in Spanish, "Género".
I like that alot more then gender when referring to objects. I'm trying to wrap my mind around why inanimate objects were gendered in the first place. Very odd concept as an English speaker.
That's actually where the English word gender comes from. It was borrowed from French as _genre_ (note that at this point the E was a schwa in both languages), then it became _gendre_ and then the schwa was dropped but *gendr isn't possible with English phonotactics so another schwa was added between the T and R for _gender._
It also originally had the same meaning as French, but it was mostly used for grammatical gender and that usage is what gave us the modern non-linguistic meaning.
Bro doesnt know about etymologie
As a spanish speaker, I remember back in highschool I asked my teacher what actually made nouns femenine or masculine and the answer was just really good. "It's actually just because they sound nice, just that." And, basically is just that really.
Correct. Spanish is a romantic language, much like a lot of other latin based languages like French, Portuguese, etc., and being a romantic language implies that the language has to sound good to be correct. It's relatively easy for us native speakers to realize when a noun was linguistically misgendered because it simply sounds wrong. Saying El Casa doesn't sound good, but La Casa does.
@@_nahuel320 Well, words sound good when correct because they're correct, not the other way around.
The gender of Romance words comes from gender in Latin, which if we go far enough comes from Indo-European genders.
Words tend to sound good when they fit what we've learned
I usually tried to approach it this way when I didn’t know the gender of a word; “ok, what sounds like it fits best?” Followed by repeating the word with le or la in front of it for like half a minute
@techpriestessmicaela8441 I got really confused when I learned that "o sangue" (the blood in pt) was translated to "la sangre" in spanish but it does sound better than "el sangre"
@@_nahuel320You do realize its romanic language as in romans from rome.
It's not romantic.
And every language basically goes about the same way you describe. Misgender a word in German and people notice immediately.n
in my (german) school my teachers always said "genus" instead of "gender" or "geschlecht" (which means sex/gender like youd use in biology class) making it clear to me that grammatical gender =/= gender.
Even in English, "grammatical gender" is only called that when the actual "genders" are two or three-otherwise, they are noun classes, which starts making a lot more sense when those classes indicate things other than natural sex or linguistic quirks, like age or origin or animacy, etc.
Fun fact about Russian - coffee in Russian is masculine, but it ends with 'e' which makes it looks like neuter, and for a couple last centuries there's a lot of discussion about coffee shifting from masculine to neuter - while some language purist says it's impossible even to think about changing words gender from one to another, the more and more people just use it with "wrong" gender and it becomes more and more popular, and I think with time dictionaries will just change it.
More fun facts - it originally was borrowed as neuter and behaved like море (sea) in a sentence. Then it was standardized as masculine and now there's a popular joke that “if it's a good coffee - it's he, but if it's a bad coffee - it's it”.
Also, in an attempt to rationalize the gender, people sometimes say кофий which actually sounds masculine. That's how my grandma pronounced it :)
@@zhulikkulikkofiy is just a predecessor of kofe, and in that way it was borrowed and thats why language purists rooting for masculine form
Кофе оно МОЁ
As a Russian I also support that kofe should be neuter in Russian. It ends with "-e", for god's sake. Just some smartass pulled out of his ass that kofe should be masculine and proscribed it in the dictionary. I say once in the Russian language, you play by the rules of the language.
I believe that it was concluded that both forms are right by some government agency, something like 7 years ago
In Norwegian we have a three gender system like German, but for traditional reasons all feminine words can essentially be treated as masculine in writing essentially making it a sort of pseudo two-gender masculine/neuter system. In some very few dialects, people also speak like this, but it’s mostly just a thing in writing, and it’s completely optional. Just thought it’d be interesting to share this information! :) Great video btw, I really enjoyed it!
So you mean, that you speak with two genders but write with three?
@@jonathanlange1339 Ok, maybe my wording was poor. I meant to say the three gender system is FAR more represented in speech, while the two gender system is more of a thing you find in writing, but even in writing it's optional.
This is highly imprecise.
Norwegian has three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). It also has a very wide variety of dialects and sociolects, and for historical reasons, people closer (geographically or socially) to the circles of power tend to speak dialects heavily influenced by Danish, which only has two genders (common and neuter). In those dialects, indefinite forms are always masculine (“a woman and a girl” = “en kvinne og en jente” rather than “ei kvinne og ei jente”) and definite forms are _almost_ always masculine with a few exceptions: “the woman and the girl” = “kvinnen og jenta” instead of “kvinna og jenta”, “jente” being one of very few words that keeps its feminine definite form almost everywhere except in Bergen.
Since these dialects are favored in bureaucratic, academic, and journalistic communication, they are also perceived as more formal and authoritative and therefore people tend to emulate them when writing. Hence, many native speakers who use the feminine orally do not use it in writing, but many native speakers do not use it orally either.
@@Squossifrage Yeah. Thanks for explaining more thoroughly. Personally I just didn't want to go into the whole tangent about multiple written languages, and Danish influence and all of that. It just seemed like a bit much to me personally.
Was looking for that in the comments. En kvinne and ei kvinne are both correct, so the word can be masculine or feminine
8:50 You say "grammatical gender is not gender" - I would rather say "gender is not sex".
The problem is that, particularly in English, people equate "gender" with "sex", when originally "gender" was more akin to "category" or "grouping" (and, as you pointed out, many languages have more than 2 "genders" - i.e. categories -, and sex (or lack thereof) is not always the relevant distinction).
The fact that "gender" is not "sex" may be seen by analysing how other languages say the word "gender".
In Portuguese, "gender" is "género" - and so you have "género masculino" (male gender) and "género feminino" (female gender).
But the Portuguese word "género" also corresponds to English word "genus" (as used in Biology). For example, the scientific name of dogs is "Canis familiaris", where "Canis" identifies the genus and "familiaris" particularises the species within that genus; and common wolfs are "Canis lupus": same genus, different species. So, wolfs and dogs belong to the same genus. If you were to say the previous sentence in Portuguese, you would say they belong to the same "género" (even if you're exemplifying with a female wolf and a male dog - because you're not talking about biological sex, nor are you talking about grammatical gender, you are talking about biological genus.
But more: Portuguese "género" also corresponds to English word "genre": where you say "musical genre" (jazz, rock, pop, etc.), we say "género musical". So, here, "género" does not mean biological sex, nor does it mean biological genus, nor does it mean grammatical gender - it means aesthetical style.
And yet more: in informal speech, "género" may also mean "type" or "kind". When you say "There are many kinds of government", in Portuguese we may say "Existem muitos géneros de governo".
i am a linguist and i think you did a great job! lots of evidence and research cited to back up every claim you made, pointing out flaws not just in the concepts of boroditsky’s study but also with the bureaucratic side of it, incredible!!
כיף לראות אותך מצליח גם פה! Keep it up!
The exclamation mark is on the wrong side for English, but I like it.
I think I’ll just go along with what Spanish does
¿This works, right?
¡Okay, the exclamation mark may be mistaken for an ‘i’!
10:49
I was today years old when I discovered that “penny” plural is apparently “pence” and not “pennies”.
a british penny pluralizes to pence, an american penny pluralizes to pennies
Pennies is the plural, when you are talking about physical copies of the penny.
Pence is more like the way we use cents, in the US, where it refers to the monetary unit, regardless of what group of coins represent it. Pence is based on the British pound, and cents is based on the US dollar.
As an example, if I ask for 10 pennies, I'm expecting 10 coins with a copper surface and Abe Lincoln's face on them. If you hand me a dime, or two nickels, that wouldn't be what I'm asking for. Maybe I'm using them for something other than representing money, such as a coinflip game, and I actually need 10 identical coins to do it, and pennies is the coin I chose.
Whereas, if I ask for 10 cents, I would accept this either as 10 pennies, or 1 dime, or 2 nickels. They all mean the same thing as the monetary value they represent, and they are all ten cents. Or, if I ask for 10 pence, I'm expecting any combination of coins that add up to 10% of a British pound.
@@carultch Also, cents are created by the decimalization of currency, as centi- means "hundredth", similar to a centimeter being a hundredth of a meter.
Wish you had more long videos 😭😭 cant wait for your next video 💕
Your first essay video? That's already good to me and it seems you did well.
Loved the video, Yuval! I could see how much you researched before making the script, you've gained one more subscriber!
i think you nailed it on this video! the fact that it's always non-gendered-language speakers (always english i've seen) telling us gendered-language speakers how we think about things, is a big red flag
Oh man, the amount of things that people got wrong on such elementary points is astonishing. I'm surprised this video wasn't filled with roasts, edits, and just general dunking on people.
But i respect it a lot that you kept it strictly civil and educational.
Thanks for your work man.
sorry for having to correct you, but at 5:05 there is a mistake, as the word for eye is masculine in both french and italian
thank you, it's exactly that. gramatical "gender" is mostly phonetic, it doesn't make any sociological sense, it's just based on sounds and we never actively think of gender when we speak, only phonetics
I had a literature teacher who had a point to say on this theory
She said that in cultures where 'death' is a female word, the personification of death (aka Grim Reaper, or something like Tanatos) was usually portrayed in art as a woman whereas in cultures who had it masculine usually portrayed it as a man.
and Ancient Greece has Death as a man AND Death as a woman.
There’s Thanatos, Death for anyone who dies peacefully (a guy)
And the Keres, Death for anyone who dies violently (many gods{?, idk if I should trust the source} that happen to be all girls)
Idk any Ancient Greek but the distinction is important.
I think language absolutely changes the way we think. But it doesn't determine the way we think. There are so many associations presented in culture and language and education, that its inevitable that the way we think turns into a massive chimera of pretty nonsense. And much of it will contradict each other as each association has a very specific use case. And it becomes a real problem when people try and expand that dictation of meaning beyond its domain.
Example: gender
We have gender by associations and feels. So Wall-e becomes male.
We have gender as classical biological reprotection.
We have gender as roles in society.
And yes we have gender as linguistic descriptions and characteristic.
But most of those are entirely cultural based and sometimes self contradicting. Thus to imply one has some sort of determination on the other is likely wrong.
I don’t understand why anyone would actually believe that any of those descriptions of keys and bridges could ever be considered contradictory, because there are lots of keys that are chunky and heavy, and also lots of keys that are delicate and intricate. Lots of bridges are dangerous but usually those are also fragile! And most bridges are also sturdy, or long, or sometimes short. None of them could be contradictory. In fact masculine and feminine aren’t even particularly contradictory things, just opposite somehow
Polish;
Ta woda (water - feminine)
To morze (sea - neuter)
Ten ocean (ocean - masculine)
Genders being for the word rather than the the thing that the word describes seems familiar to how Turkish determines if a sentence is negative or positive. There are 2 classes of negativity, by structure or meaning. If you say "He didn't come" its negative in both aspects, "She wasn't without courage" on the other hand is negative in structure but positive in meaning. In Turkish you can form sentences negative in meaning without the need of structural negativity unlike English. For example: "Nor would i talk to or go near him" "Ne onunla konuşurum ne de yanına giderim"
Just wanted to mention that we don’t even call the gender of the words “gender” in lithuanian, we literally have a seperate word for it, giminė, which directly translates to kindred in english and can be used as the direct translation too.
so in polish there are 3 genders for singular nouns/numerals/adjectives and two for plural, there is also a tricky think when grammar changes in the nouns are objects/animals/people
So what I conclude from this; English is partially a gendered language:
Take a look at Spanish, for example. the only thing ‘masculine’ about ‘ El manzana’ is the fact that ‘el’ is, to my knowledge, the word for ‘he’. But what if ‘el’ used for people vs ‘el’ used for inanimate objects is unrelated? Unlikely, but still kinda possible lol
Now English is kinda similar! We have ‘an apple’ and ‘a banana’, which could theoretically mean ‘an’ and ‘a’ are masculine and feminine. Notice in Spanish, most masculine words end in an ‘o’ or very occasionally an ‘e’ (and feminine ending in ‘a/e’). In English, it’s at the start of a word, for similar reasons as Spanish is (being phonetics), for the end of a word (or maybe even at the start)! Saying ‘an apple’ and ‘el manzana’ just flows and sounds more natural than ‘a apple’ or ‘la manzana’!
I completely understand that this is a bit of a stretch, which is how i’ve come to the conclusion that they aren’t gendered, but derived from them being gendered in whichever language English mainly was derived from.
(Also, to expand on grammatical gender being related to identity, it’s similar in Japanese! They always use different ‘I / me’ to refer to themselves, which even gives a slight insight to their personalities! (and also changes depending on who they’re talking to and the vibes they want to give off!)
E.g.:
僕 / boku: Is mainly used by men or boys who want to give the more soft or ‘good boy’ energy
あたし/atashi : is more often used by women or girls (i don’t really know too much about this one)
俺/ore: is used more by men who want to seem gangster-ish around their close friends!
those were just a few examples, i thought it might be fascinating!)
Both 'La' and "El' Mean 'The,' And Manzana has the pronoun 'La' Instead of 'El'
Él has an accent mark on the e, when it refers to the pronoun, which has ella (rhymes with Freya) for she, as its feminine counterpart. El the article (counterpart to la), has no accent mark. Accent marks on 1-syllable words, have nothing to do with pronunciation (as they are used for multi-syllable words to override the standard pattern), but rather they are just there to distinguish homophones. Like si for if, and sí for yes.
The él that means he, also means it, when you are talking about a masculine noun, or a noun of an unidentified grammatical gender. Ella would be "it" for a feminine noun.
OH MY GOD I'M SO GLAD SOMEONE MADE THIS VIDEO!!!! People who cite this article and say this shit (despite being PAINFULLY monolingual [which isn't inherently a bad thing, but in this situation it's rather relevant]) and insight that they're right irritate me to no end
And then, at least in Italian, we have words that can change their (grammatical) gender in the plural, like 'il dito' (the finger, masc.) and 'le dita' (the fingers, fem.) and this happens with many other body parts like ears, knees, arms, eyebrows... Some words even have two plurals one fem. and he other masc., but in this case the meaning has different nuances, like 'il muro' (the wall, masc.) and 'i muri' (the walls, of a house, masc.) and 'le mura' (the walls of a castle or city, fem.).
As someone who grew up bilingual English and Spanish and who's been fluent in French over half his life, this is only an issue among monoglot English-speakers who simply have no frame of reference when it comes to grammatical gender, so they erroneously attach all sorts of political baggage to it. The root of the issue is that English has lots of doublets, so we have two words, gender and genre, which essentially mean the same thing but which has taken on a more specific meaning in the former case. In Spanish, there's only one word: _género,_ just as in French there's only _genre._ You have to specify whether it's _género sexual, género gramático, género literario,_ etc.
Big lesson, anything that seems to lean heavily on hard Sapir-Whorf, is probably something you need to dive deeper on, and will often end in tears.
Also even the most trusted people on things will often fall victim to factoids (see also brains stop "growing" at 25).
I have seen way too many videos regarding grammatical gender made by English speakers that absolutely fail to mention the phonetic rules behind it.
Nice video, linguistics are weird. In Spanish (in Spain, not talking about LATAM dialects) saying "quiero comprarlo" it's normal, you "want to buy it" but in the places where "laísmo" is not used (some people use "-la" when you shouldn't and it sounds weird and many natives will call out other natives, there's a huge infight) saying "quiero comprarla" translates to "I want to buy her" which can easily be interpreted as wanting to hire a female escort or making a joke about slaves. Just for changing the gender of a verb conjugation. Language is so ingrained onto us that we don't even realize these things, so I don't think that gendered language affects us, mostly because in my autonomous community we speak Basque and Spanish since the childhood, Basque is not gendered but Spanish is, and we don't really mind the gender outside of phonetics
"Sex, Syntax, and Semantics" is gonna be the name of my D'n'D campaign
9:12 "But that doesn't mean Native German and Russian speakers are inherently super progressive."
I almost died laughing!
How did you end up delving into this?
What about dialects around the world? I'm german speaking swiss and here not only it's possible that genders (m/f/n) are being switched = meaning another definite article is used before the noun. But indefinite articles (e/en/es) themselves aren't used to assign gender coherently.
It definitely does for me, not with all words, but with a good half it does
Such a great work, thanks for this video
The issue here is that language is a fascinating subject that is generally speaking poorly understood even by specialists.
Language also has ties to sociology, history, anatomy, neurology and psychology.
The general educated person will happily go to a TED talk where a supposedly competent linguist explains to them a shiny new specious theory.
Ms Boroditsky has apparently understood that and is more than willing to cut a few corners to give people the entertainment they seek.
Oh my god fucking finally someone put into words what's been an issue for me about all the faux liguistics from people who barely speak their own language. And very nice to call out that it's the exact people who always say "check your sources" that constantly fail at that and just repeating the same false article from like 20 years ago that was obviously false back then too
super interesting video. small correction: the picture shown at 6:18 is a "Schüssel", as a native German speaker I would really only use "Napf" to refer to a pets/animals bowl not one used by humans
Saying “foreskin” is masculine in German is at best a simplification. The “Die” in “Die Vorhaut” relates to the „Haut“ (skin) part of the word.
In German, as you probably know, you can compose arbitrary words by smushing others together, and this is one of them. In English, “foreskin” works the same. However, the gender of a noun is only determined by the last word, in this case skin.
So you can create any arbitrary inconsistencies by combining stuff. Like “Frauenhelikopter” to make a nonsensical example. This “woman’s helicopter” is male, but like, that has nothing to do with the “woman” part
As a person whose first, second, and third language are romance, i've always found funny how in one language a word can be femine and masculine in another.
La tigre
El tigre
And even in the same language a man can be hermoso or hermosa depending of the phasing.
Él es una persona hermosa.
Él es un ser humano hermoso.
There are two sexes and gender is a social construct, therefore genders can be infinite.
But at the end of the day you were born with a vagina or a pennis, we aren't penguins, we have sexual dimorfism and that can't be ignored.
The language is a tool that can be used to differentiate between the two.
The intersex people are a very minuscule percentage of the population, so are the mute people.
Technology,
Entertainment,
Design
Not the first time I have noticed that speakers who are meant to Entertain are not vetted for scientific accuracy.
Great video and great job of debunking pseudoscientific research. As a native bilingual speaker of Italian + another gendered language I fully agree with the points made in the video.
As an aside, because it was brought to my attention, it’s the first time I notice that the days of the week are gendered. Never thought about it before. In Italian they are all masculine except for Sunday. In the other language it’s Sunday and Thursday that are feminine, which sounds rather random. 😅
In Spanish or French, they are translated to: Monday = moon, Tuesday = Mars, Wednesday = Mercury, Thursday = Jupiter, Friday = Venus, Saturday = Saturn, and Sunday = St. Domingue. In German, Sunday is literally translated, and also, Wednesday = middle of the week, and Friday = free day.
Regardless of any studies... In my native language, key and bridge are of masculine gender. And I simply CAN'T IMAGINE how one can use 'soft' or feminine adjectives first when talking about either thing. Both are sturdy objects that are designed to be sturdy, what fragility or intricacy they are talking about?
eyy, I had looked up this same thing for my linguistics 101 class. we were meant to look up something we were interested in, so coming from the tom scott video I thought that would be a interesting thing to cover; and I found basically the same thing you did, that the people who summarize it overshot the implications of the actual studies
Omg!! I had no idea you had a TH-cam that’s awesome!! I recently deleted tiktok for my mental health so this is a great surprise
Cognitive scientist here. I'm just gonna say this much about Boroditsky: I've been studying under a professor who published a few really impactful papers with her and while she certainly is a researcher with lots of accolades and high profile, her takes are far from being uncontroversial. I remember reading several of her papers in a class under said professor and being assigned with writing essays about her claims (it was more than obvious that my professor was hinting us a the several inconsistencies in her ideas) and I remember a lot of similar points being discussed to what you said in this video. So while you might not be a linguist you certainly have an amazing instinct for scientific and critical thinking. Consider me subscribed.
ok
genderless language is the best
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa english is one of the worst languages on earth
It's interesting that "Boroditsky" is an example of a SURNAME having grammatical gender. Because of the "-sky" suffix, the surname is masculine and always used for men. A woman with that surname would be Boroditskaja, if I am not mistaken. American government just couldn't accept these gendered surnames at all, and many Slavic people were forced to be born with masculine surnames, much like probably what Boroditsky went through
Absolutely correct. A slightly better transcription would be Boroditskaya (buh-ruh-DITZ-kuh-ya).
Masculine version is used as a default form in Russian for any word that can take gender forms including surnames (for example in vocabularies you find masculine versions). Some linguists even argue that feminine and neuter forms are going to get obsolete in several centuries along with the whole gender category within the universal tendency of grammatical simplification of indoeuropean languages.
I still can't get over "Gwyneth PaltrOW". It sounds so weird
@@veschyoleg I got used to the Balkan transliteration: Y is J there
Yep. The Yanks are especially good at messing with people's names. I once knew an American whose surname was Poe. He told me that his father's surname was Podbir and his father's father's surname had been Podbirisovsky!
One concept that is never brought up in these discussions is that in gendered languages you can still refer to someone in a gender-neutral way even though there is no neutral gender in the language, and so you can be gender-neutral while still using masculine/feminine words.
For instance, if you refer to someone using the word "person" it will be gender neutral, but if you're speaking portuguese then the word "pessoa" is feminine, so later on in the sentence you might refer to that person as "she" regardless of gender, because it has to agree with the gender of the word "person", thus a feminine pronoun has been used in a gender-neutral way.
Exactly!
Personally, as another Portuguese speaker, I think this is a much better option than using those "proposed" made-up pronouns and adjectives such as 'Pessoe', 'carinhose', 'Elu', 'ótime' 'Elx', 'delx', 'Eli' or 'Amigue' these ideas just change the language completely to a point where it just breaks and completely loses its meaning.
Also, another way to refer to someone without using the first pronouns (since that's what piss so many -people- twitter users off) it's just to not use the pronouns at all (when referring to the person). If you're directly talking to the person, you're just using the pronoun "Você" or "Tu" [You], there's no need to change it since it works for any gender. Now, if you want to refer to someone indirectly, just replace the first pronoun with the name of the person or bring up the person's name in the first sentence, so you don't have to repeat it later. Afterwards, the male adjectives can also be used as gender-neutral.
Let me give some examples:
"Cris disse que iria na loja mais tarde, -ele/ela- também contou que iria passar na sua casa depois" (Cris said that would go in the shop later, -he/she- also told that -he/she- was going to pass by your house later) [not using the pronouns]
"Alex é -um homem/uma mulher- uma pessoa muito educada. (Alex is a very polite person -man/woman- ) [using the feminine noun of "educada" because of "pessoa" instead of the name's gender]
"Sam, você é muito bom nisso" (Sam, you're very good at this) [although Sam may not identify as a man, "bom" (the male adjective) is used as a neutral to the feminine "boa", which if it was used instead would have implied that Sam would be a woman]
It's the same in German "Person" is feminine and has to be referenced using a feminine pronoun. In a similar vein the word "Mensch"(human being) is masculine
O mesmo acontece às palavras: testemunha, criança, vítima etc., etc....
@@ponteirodorato the same in Spanish, you can use their preferred noun instead of a pronoun and you don't have to gender anything else in a sentence outside of adjectives or some nouns which if you put them in masculine it's the neutral noun, but people don't really see that. People are making a fuss about nothing
@@ponteirodorato honestly i also don't like the idea of the made-up pronouns, but using this other form seems so much more of a hastle that it's just better to use the neo pronouns.
And, i don't think it breaks the language (besides the already gender neutral words, it's just pointless to change these), it's just a third noun added to the list.
Why do you think it's that bad?
/Genuine question
The biggest problem with grammatical gender is calling it "grammatical gender" instead of the more precise "noun classes". It confuses people who don't understand how languages work.
Completely correct.
gender being used in a more abstract sense, more akin to its cognate "genre" semantically?
@@agun214 Gender and genre are indeed just the English and French spelling of what used to be the exact same word.
When grammatical "genders" are referred to as masculine, feminine and neuter, however, then the connotation - certainly in a world not yet having reached the postfeminist stage - is anything but abstract to many people. And that is made into an issue that didn't need to exist if proper terminology had been universally adopted.
Great video on an interesting topic, thank you.
As a native German speaker I'd like to add that words can change gender when you add specific suffixes. The diminutive suffix "-chen" /çən/ makes all nouns it is added to neuter. You could take the word "die Katze" (feminine; the cat) which becomes "das Kätzchen" (neuter) or "der Hund" (masculine; the dog) which becomes "das Hündchen" (again, neuter). This can be applied to most nouns (hesitant to say all, there might be exceptions that I’m unaware of).
Furthermore, there are words that change meaning based on which gender you use for them. Not many of those exist, but you do come across them from time to time. For example the word "Schild" /ʃɪlt/ can mean "the sign” (in the sense of street signs etc) when neuter (das Schild), or "the shield" (thing used for protection) when masculine (der Schild).
So gender really is just a grammatical category that can be influenced by simple suffix-use, or in some cases it helps to avoid ambiguity. I don't think that my perception of gender changes when I put a suffix behind a word, or change its gender for the purpose of clearer understanding
If the word ends in -ch you wouldn't usually add -chen because it makes it very hard to pronounce. It still makes it neuter of course, you just use -lein instead of -chen. So the diminutive of "Bach" is not "Bächchen", it's "Bächlein" (-lein can of course be used for words that don't end in -ch too). It's also why "Mädchen" is neuter.
@@user-es7ui5mc1m
true, but not because it makes it harder to pronounce. Adding the diminutive to bach just is pronounced like bächien, which is not hard to pronounce. The real reason is that it is perceived as looking and sounding odd with a lot of words. Bach is arguably one were it still works.
Portuguese can also be gender fluid based on the suffixes attached to the word.
The word for _“socks”_, _”small socks”_ and _“big socks”_ are _“a meia”_, _”a meinha”_, and _“o meião”_.
Some may say that’s because small is fem while big is masc, but Car is consistently masc (_o carro, o carrão, o carrinho_, for regular, big, and small Car)
@@user-es7ui5mc1m Certain regions also have the "-erl/-al"(same suffix, just with the vowel shifted) diminutive suffix.
If you are talking about one cat, and only one cat, there is "Der Katz", similar to English die vs. dice.
This is a fantastic video, probably the best I've seen on grammatical gender. I'm glad someone is keeping tabs on us all when we get things wrong!
But since you did use a clip of mine in the video, I hope you'll indulge me as I defend myself a little bit... I think I do overstate Boroditsky's ideas' validity to make the case, I concede that. But I did so in order to really steel-man that argument, assume it was valid, and then say that it wouldn't really matter anyway. The tendency of classifying feminine objects with certain traits would not be a case of grammatical gender shaping how you think, it would be an example of the cultural norms around us (in this case, sexism) infiltrating our language. Grammatical gender, there, would be no more than a conduit. That's more the point I was trying to make.
Again though, great video, subscribed and looking forward to more content :)
Hey! Thanks so much! Really glad you enjoyed it. But yes, I responded to someone else who mentioned this, but I wasn't trying to frame you as someone intentionally misleading anybody. Just as an example of how prevalent the myth behind Boroditsky's claims have gotten. Apologies if I came off negatively when bringing you up, I really liked your essay on grammatical gender as well and I think I would categorize it as a similar position to mine.
@@YuvalTheTerrible thanks, as I said, really appreciated this video and your comment :)
@@YuvalTheTerrible thanks, as I said, really appreciated this video and your comment :)
It is perhaps good to note that "Gender" is being used more as it's etymological sibling, "Genre".
In spanish, both are the same word.
I'm gonna go mad
In German „Geschlecht“ can mean sex/gender but also a (noble) bloodline. It's also used in formulations like „Menschengeschlecht“ (the human race) or „ein frei[es] Geschlecht“ (a free people). Additionally, the Latin word "genus" is also used for classifying animals. So I agree that you could interpret "gender" as generally referring to a group of related things distinguished from other groups.
Same in Portuguese. And "genus" (Biology).
@@Not_TailsBrazilian portuguese as well and I hate that it's the same word
@@Not_Tails "I can read you like a book"
I feel like a lot of the words that are in English that they describe as “masculine” or “feminine” differ for the most part in their origin. The masculine words “long, big, strong” are Germanic, but “elegant, beautiful, extended” have romance roots. Interesting how that connotation is made…
Very interesting observation.
i think that study is full of s**t, might be ideologically motivated and probably not worth the paper it was printed on.
þis is also sortə þe case wiþ swearwords (if i’m not much mistaken) - my understanding is þat when þe normans did þeir big ol’ invasion , english started using french ( / romance) roots as þe polite / (‘)edible(’) versions , and þe germanic ones as þe crude / animal form -
defecate / relieve vs sh\*t / poo(p)
poultry vs chicken
beef vs cow
sex vs f\*ck
@@anterrobang9298 that’s exactly right. It’s almost like an honorific system.
@@anterrobang9298 neat way of typing, I probably would have felt like you were too pompous if not for the fact that I was actually able to read what you said and enjoyed the challenge.
Vsauce's video "why are bad words bad" goes into detail on what you said, though I have a feeling youve seen it already so this is more for others that read my reply
As an Italian speaker I also find it interesting how English has (or had, until the last few years) adjectives that you would usually attribute to people of a particular gender. For example, "handsome" and "beautiful". To me every adjective can go with every noun, just make the noun/adgective genders match, as said in the video, mostly for musicality
This is still very much the case: a 'handsome woman' and a 'beautiful boy' have very specific, and highly nuanced meanings. Broadly speaking: if you hear *anyone* using either term;- stay away from them.
@@chrisoneill3999?
@@chrisoneill3999"Beautiful" is an adjectives often used by English speakers to describe both males and females since it's literal definition is "pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically".
"Handsome" has two meanings: 1. (of a man) good-looking. 2. (of a number, sum of money, or margin) substantial. ~ Oxford Dictionary.
So yeah, "Handsome woman" sounds a little strange, but "beautiful boy" is not.
From reading a lot of 19th century novels “handsome woman” was used for older and or married women. Rarely for young women and I don’t remember ever seeing it associated with girls. Not being a native speaker I am not sure if the nuance applies today.
or "blond" and "blonde"
Thank you!!!! As a linguist and Spanish speaker this has always driven me crazy because it feels so counterintuitive and completely unrelated how I actually use gender when I speak Spanish. Monolingual English speakers will make the most wild baseless claims about features not present in English and act like it's totally crazy and weird when in reality it's easily explained by other things that are just like, core processes of language.
genderless language is the best
Same way I feel about cases. English speakers going nuts about how there are so many cases in an XY language, but it's the same thing as using a bunch of prepositions.
They have this bizarre idea that Spanish speaking people think a chair is a woman. 😂
@@carkawalakhatulistiwayeah, sure buddy. Try translating "la diferencia entre el mar y la mar" and let me know how your genderless language needs a paragraph to convey a similar enough idea.
After learning Latin and Spanish, I’m convinced that anyone who conflates noun genders with human genders never bothered to learn a Romance language.
the part about grammatical gender making people more conscious about gender identity is so fascinating i never thought of that.
I also found how, at least in my gendered language, the primary progressive thought is not to eliminate gendered words (like in English), but instead to create new "femenitives", female gendered words used to describe, for example, professions that used to be considered stereotypically male.
@@YA_LUNNAYA_PONIYep, it seems to be happening in some languages. Yet it’s a pretty dumb reason tbh. Just like the video says, these are two groups, not actually genders. But if it makes the speakers think they’re being more progressive then they should just go for it. Language is ever changing and changing a few grammatical genders is not the end of the world. It’s just sorta unnecessary.
@@Luis-fd2bi but doesn't it sound clanky to use "[male noun] [female verb]"? "водитель (он/его) поехала (она/ее)"? even that i think is a good reason
also in russian (which is most likely the language they're talking about) there's already a ton of feminine nouns that were made from male nouns: студентка, барыня, попадья, пионерка, комсомолка, водительница... it's not something new, people are just trying to make this rule apply to more words
there's also masculatives such as швей (man who sews, from швея (woman who sews, she/her)) and балерин (male ballet dancer, from балерина (ballerina, female ballet dancer, she/her)) so its not one-sided
Yeah, it does. As an NB it makes you very conscious of the fact that in your language there's no way to use non-gendered words when talking about yourself.
Like, you say "I was going to..." and you already have to gender yourself as either masc or fem
@@Luis-fd2bi Human Language loves redundancy. Redundancy means that if you miss one part, you can usually put the rest together purely from context.
the whole thing about native speakers of gendered languages is so funny to me, I was in french class one time, and my classmates said "god I'm happy danish doesn't have grammatical gender" even though it VERY MUCH DOES, it's just not called masculine and feminine, even though the common-neuter distinction danish does have works in the exact same way as more "traditional" nomenclature for grammatical gender. Safe to say when I explained that danish indeed did have grammatical gender they didn't believe me, until one of them looked it up and saw I was right.
Though to be honest, as an anglophone who learnt both Danish and French in school, Danish just being straight forward and calling its grammatical genders "en" words and "et" words, depending on if their article is "en" or "et", just made everything so much simpler to understand! At least compared to learning French and being weirded out by the concept that words can be "masculine" or "feminine". Danish just gets straight to the point 😂
@@Respectable_Username
@acatwithahatt7999
You're both right. As a native Danish speaker I didn't think about the Danish grammatical genders as "genders" and was equally confused/frustrated when I started learning "really gendered" languages. Of course, they are all (grammatically) gendered - also Danish. Many Danish speakers just don't think about it that way. So it kind of helps to not get into the "grammatical gender = gender" trap when you just don't use that word. En-words and Et-words don't make you think "what does this have to do with boys and girls"?
Finally the video we all waited for
I think the different choice of adjectives between cultures has more to do with the image these words provoke.
In my very biased german brain, when i heard bridge i immediatly thought of a steel bridge. Because those are waayy more common here.
(I suppose the old bridges were mostly blown up in a war of your choice)
...steel bridges are way more sleek or elegant in their design....thats the point of using steel after all. They should be elegant architecture and (if you are into that) Something beautiful
Spain from what i know still has more old and sturdy stone bridges so the spanish speakers might have thought of other bridges then the germans. (Conjecture on my part)
With keys i am unsure but we don't really have these "old-style" keys anymore. I've rarely ever seen them.
And the only times i've seen more "beautiful" keys was in hostels/airbnbs in romance countries like italy and spain.
...but this is of course only anecdotal evidence. I can only say that ~1% of germans would think of these "beautiful" keys when hearing the word.
Much the same, to how gender was forced on the surname of my grandparents, during USSR time
Aga-Ali to Agaalieva/Agaaliev
I am Spanish fron Galicia. A bridge is " un puente " in Spanish , but in some poethry old songs and old writting you can also find " la puente " . In galician it is allways femenine " a ponte " as in Portuguese , the same bridge at one side of the border in Huelva , in Andalussia is " el puente " and you jump to the other side and it is " a ponte ".
@@TheMaru666 that's actually pretty interesting. ^^
As a native Italian speaker, that "study" about bridges and keys always made me cuckle thinking about masculine nouns that become feminine as plurals in Italian (l'uovo/le uova, il braccio/le braccia etc), and how those would totally mess with the study's premises and conclusions LMAO
The same thing happens in German, all nouns get the "feminine" article in plural, although the verbs and adjectives surrounding them have their own unrelated plural forms. It doesn't seem like the study took that into account anyway
Or adjective's gender is choosen by speaker in most of languages
It happens in Romanian as well. We call those neutral nouns
@@alexperper6390in Italian they end in -a just like the Latin, neutral nouns from which they derive. Ovum, ova in Latin become uovo, uova in Italian. The fact that plural eggs are considered feminine in Italian may be more proof that "genderization" of nouns is made by sound association.
On the other hand though, this got me thinking about words from non-gendered languages that are used in gendered languages. In Italian we say "il mouse" as in "the mouse" (m.) because mouse is topo and topo is masculine, I guess? But then how does the "sound association" theory work with that? There's no final vowel in "mouse", which should be what's causing the gender association, according to this theory.
I hope OP reads me - they've done a great job with this video and hope they have more info on this.
In russian there is not only neutral(or middle) gender, but also general(unspecefied) gender. Job titles are general gender for example, but they follow rules of their phonetic gender.
So in russian sentence with femine actor, femine adjective musculine job title and musculine adjective is gramatically correct. Example: Девушка умная - врач замечательный.
You did a really great job with this video Yuval!
As a native Spanish speaker I think you made a really great point when saying that having gendered words doesn’t mean we actually see those things as the assigned “gender” ( I say “gender” because I don’t think that “una puerta (a door)” is a woman, it’s just a word with feminine gender, which is different from the social gender). Sometimes I see masculine words as gender neutral things. If I have to personify something as the days of the week (all masculine in Spanish) I would imagine them in a more gender neutral way, because they are just days and not men or women.
Also, just to add another example to this point 17:37 there are masculine personifications of feminine words in Spanish . LA muerte (death) is a feminine word that tends to be represented with masculine traits or seen as more masculine. Or EL amor (love), a masculine word that tends to be represented either with a boy (Cupid) or a women ( making a reference to the Greek goddess Venus).
This a great video!
I feel like the whole idea of this study is very english-centric, the ideas presented only make sense if explained in a language like English which has only one grammatical gender and people are left to assign gender to words strictly based on cultural context. I speak Polish which has three grammatical genders, if I'm going to describe feminine noun as "strong" then I have to use a feminine version of that adjective because in order to sound natural an adjective has to follow the grammatical gender of the noun it's describing. In Polish I could describe a tower as beautiful and strong ("piękna i mocna wieża") and in my mind I used two feminine adjectives to describe a feminine noun, by the time someone translates it to English they might think that I used a one feminine and one masculine adjective to describe a masculine noun.
Which brings me to another issue with this which is that translation is not just changing words one for one. Polish has a handful of words that depending on the context could be translated into English as "strong". When talking about a person in most contexts it makes more sense to use the word "silny" (fem. silna) which is strong as in able to lift a lot, when talking about a bridge I would probably us the word "mocny" which also translates as strong but as in well build and resistant to damage. So if the conversation is about how the grammatical gender of nouns affects our use of adjectives the conversation needs to be about the exact adjectives used in the language they were used in and the culture that speaks that language, not the English translation of it.
If this study had something to reveal about how language affects our thinking then well... it all got lost in translation 😎
One example of how our thinking influences grammatical gender: In German, girl (Mädchen) is neuter because the diminutive always is.
So a "correct" sentence would be: The girl and it's dog (Das Mädchen und sein Hund) but the neuter possessive coincides with the masculine. So most people say: The girl and her dog (Das Mädchen und ihr Hund).
In Polish, KOPCIUSZEK "Cinderella" has masculine gender and MYSZKA MIKI "Mickey Mouse" has feminine gender.
If that "cognitive researcher" (with all her partial claims) knew that we call an adolescent girl coming out of childhood (between twelve and sixteen years of age) as PODLOTEK (which is a masculine word), she would probably claim that Poles think that children are born without gender (we also have neuter -Ę for 'young', so DZIEWCZĘ 'a young girl" is neuter) but then there is some transfiguration that change all them in males and with menstruation some of them became females ;)
[Even while writing it, it sound like BS that, that person with a Slavic surname claimed - she obviously never heard about Slovene language, in which it is "a common phenomenon that some nouns switch gender either when declining or in all cases altogether, depending on the declension, dialect, and case. In formal contexts, the change occurs in plural, while the dialectal changes occur more sporadically" ;)]
@@magpie_girl3741nigdy nie słyszałem aby ktoś używał słowa "podlotek", skąd jesteś? Bo może to regionalizm którego nigdy nie widziałem.
As a native speaker of a gendered language, I also don't think we think about the grammatical gender of nouns when we speak. I still remember how surprised I was as a little kid to learn in school that nouns have genders. That was something that hadn't even crossed my mind until I heard it in school. I remember how ecstatic I was to tell my mom that this noun is a girl and this noun is a boy and so on... Obviously that's nonsense. Grammatical gender and gender have next to nothing to do with each other.
you already had known about that cuz without that you couldn't use it. That's not excactly how normal genders work so you just didnt know how to name it
They probably had something to do with each other in the early days, until everyone gave up thinking about it.
they have everything to do with each other, which is why mental gender was coined after the linguistic term. before then, it was sex not gender.
Then why were things like spirits, the Holy Ghost, mythical creatures you can barely make out, abstract concepts, etc. given gender?
Not to mention inanimate objects in languages 📜.
@@kazekagekid
genderless language is the best
One thing I believe people need to know is that GRAMMATICAL "gender" is not the same as human SOCIAL "gender". They are often conflated because they use the same word. However, the "gender" in "grammatical gender" basically just means an arbitrary category. It just happens to be that the most popular languages that have this property have at least two grammatical genders named "masculine" and "feminine", mostly Indo-European and Afroasiatic languages. We could hypothetically rename the masculine gram.gender as "Noun class 1" and the feminine gram.gender as "Noun class 2" and there would be less confusion. Bantu languages are often described as having noun classes even if they work the same as grammatical gender just because they have more than ten and are not limited to "masculine" and "feminine".
One of my favorite basic examples of this is that 'girl' is neuter (gram.gender) but of course, is semantically female. While some objects like 'water' in Spanish can change their gram.gender depending on context. It would be less confusing if we described as Noun class 3 or whatever and as changing from Noun class 1 to 2.
As a Hebrew speaker, whenever someone talks abt gendered language, I think about the fact there is dumb shit like ביצה (egg)(pronounced beytza) being feminine but ביצים (eggs)(propounded beytzim) ends in ים )im) which is the masculine ending for plural and three are many more (שולחן, כיסא,נעליים...) wnd no one talks abt it!
Great video! Your style of teaching translates really well into longer format video essays. I personally would love to see more content like this from you. Also, I've never realized how funny your TikToks are out of context. Got a good laugh out of me.
The russian language does technically have rules for telling the grammatical gender, as I eventually learned from a book; but we were never taught these rules in school or from parents, it's just something most of us understand naturally.
But I do have to point out something. While the grammatical gender of a word is just the gender of a word... When it comes to fairytales, wher3 you can have fantasy creatures, or inanimate objects come to life, then the grmmatical gender actually becomes real gender in such stories.
For example, the word Смерть (Death) is female. So if Death is an actual character in a fairytale, she would be female in Russian; and I find it weird to see Death refered to as He in english stories.
Owl becaome female in the russian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh, because the word Сова has grammatical female gender.
Волшебник is male, and Волшебница is female, both meaning Wizard.
However, Ведьма (Witch) is always female, and I don't think there's an equivalent.
I've actually seen several times, particularly in the Nintendo fandom, where people see witches like Gruntilda and Cackletta, and are unsure if it's a boy or a girl, and I'm always like - well, duh, you can clearly tell that's a female character from it being called a witch.
(Not to mention, the name ends with the letter A, which, while not always, typically happens if female names in Russian, and thus immedietly makes me think that the name belongs to a female character).
And by the way, as far as verbs having gender, our verbs have gender, but only in the past tense. So in present and future tense, the verb sounds the same, but in past tense - it would have to match with the grammatical gender of the word it belongs to.q
This applies to Ukrainian as well
It's annoying when a word ends with а або о but doesn't match female or male, and is instead the other way around. Idk it's kinda hard to learn so many different forms of words, and having so many different classifications for different use cases.
as a native german speaker i've always doubted that study. i feel like grammatical gender is a second thought and, as you said, grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender. native speakers don't really think about the grammatical gender (not even subconsciously i feel like) which is why i think saying that it affects your perception on certain objects is completely wrong
Spanish here agrees with you.
Yea we do lol never heard of Poetry you pleb
Oh yes, we do think about grammatical gender. We even discuss it with passion.
Though only when we don't agree what gender to use.
(Die Nutella)
@@Sternburg *Das Nutella
Sorry I couldn't stop myself. 'Die Nutella' just sounds so wrong.
@@Silverpoplar as someone who has no experience or knowledge ln the subject, it's das. die nutella doesn't sound or look right
God thank you so much for this video. I watched that Boroditsky Ted Talk some time ago and was astonished at how everyone in the comments was like “wow this is so interesting and true” and nobody was calling her out on it. As a Spanish speaker, if I think about a “key” I just think about how it’s metallic and I hate touching metal cause it makes my skin crawl lmao. Nothing about it being feminine or delicate. I agree with everything you said👍🏻
They love the Ted Talk because they want it to be true, it 'confirms' their preconceived notions on gender and language.
@@regenen yeah, just a lazy way to feel smarter
people happily latch onto things that are superficially plausible. Even better if it is a pretentious TED talk that makes the claim
I remember watching that Ted Talk I thought it was plausible and didn't think much of it. It's interesting to find out that it wasn't true. So you have grammatical gender but the gender isn't really a gender it's more like a device between different kinds of words.
Do you know what the purpose of these genders is?
@@avivastudios2311 exactly, i would say we only notice gender when it applies to people or animals (el profesor - the male teacher ; la profesora - the female teacher). For objects, the grammatical gender doesn’t have any implications of meaning.
I wouldn’t say it has an intrinsic purpose as languages aren’t created but rather they just happen and develop naturally, but the most practical “purpose” when we communicate is easing ambiguities.
Imagine we’re talking about 2 things (a flower, in Spanish female, and a watch, in Spanish male), and I say “Give it to me” In English, you would need to ask: “the flower or the watch?” but in Spanish you would already know cause female “it” is “la” and male “it” is “lo”. So the main purpose I would say is making communication faster & more efficient. Same way as English probably has some features that also achieve an efficient communication that Spanish doesn’t. All languages are different but efficient in their own ways :)
I participated in a psych student's version of this study (as an English speaker in a made up language) and completely messed up the data. Part of the "made-up language" section of the experiment was memorizing the "genders" of several words, so when we got to the "similarity" section of the experiment, I thought it was more of the memorization, and thus marked several words as "similar" to men and women because I remembered that they were classified with that gender.
that's pretty funny actually, I think it's really hard to do a study on this subject that doesn't bias or mislead its participants in some way
you didn't mess up anything, if you ask people meaningless questions you will get meaningless answers
You didn't mess it up, your experience just shows how a study--including one that people are taking seriously--can be badly designed.
As a Castillian speaker who studies linguistics ¡Thank you y muchísimas gracias amigo! Even here amongst people of my country we've started to have these perceptions of language brought over by people who do not speak our language and it has caused many people to overthink things that honestly, we should just not think that much about. Grammatical Gender is just that, categories that happened to have man, woman or something else as the most defining one. Also, on a note: in language families it is very common for what you described with the e, o and the combinations of consonants or vowels, specially in indo-european where e and o served the same purpose, to conjugate the specific gender of something.
you mean SPANISH
@@bourbon2242 its the same bro
@@faziarry I know
@@faziarry Not really, as Castilian refers to European Spanish, whereas the Spanish spoken in other Spanish-speaking countries are slightly different, but we usually don't call that Spanish "Castilian". For example, Castilian uses vosotros for the plural form of you in a familiar setting that uses 2nd-person plural verb conjugations, whereas Latin America always uses ustedes (3rd-person plural) no matter the situation for the plural form of you. Another thing is that Castilian uses the present perfect conjugation (haber + past participle) for past-tense verbs, whereas Latin America uses the preterite more.
@@bourbon2242 Not really, as Castilian refers to European Spanish, whereas the Spanish spoken in other Spanish-speaking countries are slightly different, but we usually don't call that Spanish "Castilian". For example, Castilian uses vosotros for the plural form of you in a familiar setting that uses 2nd-person plural verb conjugations, whereas Latin America always uses ustedes (3rd-person plural) no matter the situation for the plural form of you. Another thing is that Castilian uses the present perfect conjugation (haber + past participle) for past-tense verbs, whereas Latin America uses the preterite more.
Lera Boroditsky comes from Belarus, a slavic languages speaking country, Russian, Belarussian, Polish and Ukrainian are the most common ones. These laguages recognize the grammatical "gender". You see, all nouns in these laguages have it, and derivatives of nouns like surnames have it as well. Her surname written in English, "Boroditsky", is in masucline gender according to any slavic language grammar. There is a tradition in the Unite States to switch feminine slavic last names to masculine, most likely because women who get married take the last names of their husbands.
Funnily enough, if you go to her wiki page and switch the laguage to Russian it would list 2 versions of her last name - "f. Бородицкая (Boroditskaya)" and "m. Бородицки (Boroditski)".
Umm, you're mistaking grammar cases with grammar genders
This isn’t really a gotcha so much as a “people don’t always stick to the naming custom” thing.
@@KatouMegumiosuYou are the one mixing something up here. Grammatic cases are not even touched in that comment.
I’ve been trying to learn Ukrainian and find it overwhelming how everything is gendered. My native language doesn’t have grammatical gender at all, let alone as much as Ukrainian.
As an Italian speaker, I don’t think the genders of the words ever affected the way I think about them. Every word has a gender so you don’t really think much of it. Maybe English speakers, while learning a language like Italian, would think about it since it’s something new but with a native speaker that probably won’t happen. Plus there are words that have a gender in the singular form and the other in the plural form so the experiments wouldn’t really hold at that point
I feel like if the experiment only included people who aren’t native speakers of a gendered language, then there would be a higher correlation of the object being labeled male or female just because they are thinking whether it is a feminine or masculine word. If the experiment only included people native to their gendered language, then I predict that there would be little to no correlation of them picking male or female based on its grammatical gender.
A lot of people don't seem to realise that the word gender just means category. It comes from the latin _genus_ which means family.
I recommend reading about the etymology of different words, it's really interesting to understand a bit more about how our languages came to be. :)
A lot of people don't seem to remember that language is more descriptive and adapts with culture than presciptive.
The word gender didn't come to be associated with... well gender in English until the 70s
In Polish we call it rodzaj which is exactly genus, like in biological classification.
Great video! FYI Norwegian 'kvinne' isn't really masculine, at least not in the way presented here. It's just that feminine and masculine nouns in Norwegian Bokmål can be optionally grouped together as common gender. This has to do with Bokmål effectively having two interacting grammatical gender systems: a three gender-system with masculine, feminine and neuter, which has its origin in the system found in native Norwegian dialects, and a Danish-like system where only common gender and neuter are distinguished. So it's not that 'kvinne' is optionally masculine, it's just that you don't have to distinguish the feminine from the masculine. Dictionaries often list common gender as just 'masculine' as the endings for the two are the same, which can be misleading. Hope this clarifies things!
in Nynorsk (the other written norwegian language) you can't opt out of of the feminine as you can in Bokmål.
A note: The origin of the word gender is from Latin, wherein the word meant literally "type / kind", which is why we use the concept to describe human sexual dimorphism and to group similar sounding words together.
I want to thank you so much for making such an in-depth video about the flip side of this very tropey topic. I am not sure why people today are so eager to go back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even after we've already disproven it.
We literally do. Using a descriptivist lens the word gender is synonymous with the word sex for the vast majority of people. The redefining of the word emanating from narrow disciplines under the liberal arts umbrella which has been forced onto many doesn’t undo that.
@@colecalame5815by that argument as long as enough people accept that gender and sex are different things then that becomes true regardless of why it happens.
As Freud said, a banana is sometimes is just a banana. Although my language has grammatical gender, I don't think of a bridge as a man (it's masculine). I DO NOT PERSONIFY objects, unless in very special circumstances. It's just a bridge, not a human I might want to have sex with.
As a Turkish speaker my language is genderless so I have always found this consept very interesting. I didn't questioned English at all but when I started studying Arabic and German at the same time, I got curious and thought about that bridge study thing a lot which confused me a lot. This video helped me to understand better, thank you.
😊
Llmll
Lk
Whenever I believe there is no possible way for Turks to be worse y'all manage to point out another way you suck.
I love watching video essays, and you did great on this one. I hope you do more stuff like this. Also, I feel calling a boat a "She" makes sense, they are strong and sturdy but also elegant and beautiful. Although you can use "He" or "She," I believe people tend to label objects based on their appearance, and being elegant and beautiful is particularly noticeable for most people (at least in my opinion).
'She' is usually given to things that keep us going on a large scale. Ships, states, justice, nature. Anything that's an analog to a mother
@@JonahNelson7 I think most vehicules are called she because of traditional masculinity. If you take the most cliché, traditional, (sexist) nuclear family you can imagine, easy to see the man, the father, seeing his car/boat/motorbike as something he owns, he loves, he has an intimate relationship, is a prized posession and an exteriorisation of his masculity (car dude, biker, sailor : very masculine archetypes.) In those ways, the vehicule can ressemble a wife or daughter, so boom, she ("She's a beauty ain't she ?). I wouldn't immedialty go "she" for a bicycle like I would for a car, motobike or ship, probably because it's less associated with those very traditional, very masculine archetypes.
And yet in Portuguese boats are "He"
boats being "elegant and beautiful" is entirely subjective
saying that "oh it only makes sense" is worthless because it makes sense to YOU (and probably the culture you grew around), not everyone
She's a beaut.
Good essay!
I'm glad you covered it at all, but I think you should've put more stress on this: so-called grammatical gender *isn't* gender -- at all. The word originally used was genus, which means: 'type, family, kind'. 'Grammatical gender' is simply a classification, for example of nouns in languages like German or Spanish. While there is a certain correlation between non-linguistic human behaviour and grammatical nominal classification, this is a phenomenon you can observe in semantics everywhere: that real-life objects your words denote may influence the way you speak about them. Thus, while (to my knowledge) women and men will fit their 'grammatical gender' in most 'gendered' languages, this is not a feature of gendered languages but of language referencing extralinguistic realities.
Well explained! I speak 2 different gendered languages natively and I've NEVER thought about the gender of gender words! And i am sure >90% of people out there don't!
yOU HAVE A TH-cam CHANNEL???
“Grammatical gender” should be called different, to remove confusion, same for the categories themselves.
Sadly, it _is_ known by the technical term of gender, but this word has been highjacked for discussion of sexual politics :-}.
GENRE
A Bulgarian speaker here (3 genders - masculine, feminine and neuter)! I just want to say that when I was still learning English in school, quite often I would refer to a specific object using a personal pronoun in the gender of the object in Bulgarian. So, for example: "Yesterday I bought a new house. She has two floors...". This mistake was not exclusive to my speaking abilities, but also to my peers'. So I guess genders of concepts and objects stick with you for a long time, and still, now that I am aware of that, whenever I try to "feel" the gender of a random object without thinking about it in Bulgarian and translating the word, my feeling never lets me down
Same with me, I am Slovakian and some people on the internet went as far as telling me I am misogynistic because I assumed somebody is "he", while in Slovak the gender for person is masculine. I feel like English natives should give us a break and they should stop overthinking BS.
Yep, tho I'd say “he has two floors” cuz дом is masculine in Russian.
It does stick, tho I didn't have a problem remembering English rules.
yeah, so gender in words is never taught in Mexico, even in Spanish lessons, around age 6 to 8 they make you form sentences as an exercise, but the focus is mostly on conjugation and identifying the parts of the sentence (Subject, Verb, adverb, etc.) No one messes the pronouns because it just rolls with the tongue, this is a thing you learn before even fully understand what gender even is.
I would like to add on, that the word for ocean in German can NOT ONLY be masculine or feminine it can ALSO be neutral with "das Meer" (which is also actually the most common way to refer to it in normal everyday speech)
so it can be:
"das Meer"
and
"der Ozean"
AS WELL AS
"die See"
And there is "der See", which means "the lake", which is why the Caspian Lake is mistranslated to English as the Caspian Sea, similar to how we pronounce the "W" in words that were translated from German, such as "Wagner", from Russian Baгнep, which then gets translated to German as "Wagner", and then when translated to English, people started pronouncing it with a W sound, rather than a V sound, and don't get me started on how we pronounce "Ludwig" as well.
Your body part point is very true. La bite always throws me. In defence of German on die Vorhaut, that´s not a fair point. Die Haut (a more generic noun) is feminine, and with compound nouns the gender is always that of the final noun. Any skin anywhere is feminine.
I'm German and I'm speaking German in my day-to-day but also English in most of my free time, and I've done so for about 25 years. I can confidently say that when I speak and think in English I'm not mentally associating words to genders at all. "I've lost my key on the bridge" does not prompt my mind to think or feel "I've lost the masculine on the feminine". Even when speaking and thinking in German it's not really like that. I would say the vast majority of gendered objects are just learned. You probably know the feeling when you started using a proper name for a thing because somebody happens to have named it that way and only much later do you notice that you've never even thought about why it has that name, you just learned it that way. There are even words with a grammatical gender I would say goes fundamentally against how they feel. "Der Schmetterling" is the butterfly and is masculine, but never has any butterfly felt masculine to me.
You haven't met the right butterfly yet
As a Romanian native speaker, I always assumed the thin and low (female and male) voices are the definition of grammatical gender. That was the answer I lived by.
The Wagen (m) - Auto (n) - Karre (f) and Fraß (m) - Essen (n) - Speise (f) triads are quite interesting: In each case, the three words refer to the same thing, but with different connotations. 'Wagen' (m) sounds quite plush, and so does 'Speise' (f), while 'Karre' (f) and 'Fraß' (m) are colloquial and more or less derogatory. The neutrum words are most frequently used and non-evaluative in both cases.
Same thing with French voiture/auto/char and Spanish coche/auto/carro as well.
As much as I love Tom Scott, that particular video always gave me doubts (as someone with a profession in languages). Now I see how Boroditsky's assumptions have had an impact that is to be taken with a lump of salt.
I absolutely loved the video. Thank you.
As a person who speaks five languages (Ukrainian, Russian, German, Spanish and English), four of which are gendered, I would say that grammatical genders did not really influence my perception.
It is actually interesting that amongst the speakers of the Ukrainian language there is an issue with genders because of the influence of Russian.
For instance, pain in Russian is боль (feminine), but in Ukrainian it’s біль (masculine). But since the USSR the Ukrainian speakers often perceive pain as feminine using feminine conjugation of adjectives and verbs.
It doesn’t mean, however, that Ukrainians used to associate pain with men in the past, and now suddenly chose to associate it with women, because it is absurd.
These claims about the correlation between grammatical gender and perception are inconsistent to say the least.
Totally! Also in Ukrainian the same way to refer to the “gender” of words is not called *gender* but birthplace, рід. It helps when you think about it because there is not a connection between the ideas of man and woman but rather the place where the words originated from.
English speakers take notes!!!
Yep, in Russian there are long(длинный) for musculine, long(длинная) for feminine and long(длинное) for middle(I don't think calling this gender neutral because it IS a gender and can be confused with unspecified(general) gender).
it's interesting how even tho russian and ukranian are very closely related languages with very similar words, some words are still masculine in one and feminine in the other. the same thing happens with spanish and portuguese, for example "o leite" and "la leche" both mean milk, they have the same etymological roots and almost the same pronunciation but in portuguese it's masculine and in spanish it's feminine
I don’t know Ukrainian, but in Polish there are few words that may describe pain: ból - masculine, cierpienie - neutral, boleść/bolesność - feminine. So it´s another example how gender is attached to word and not to concept. In plural they are all non-masculine (apart from male humans everything is non-masculine in plural form).
A funny case happens with our anthem here in Brazil, the Brazilian National Anthem, sung in Portuguese.
Throughout the anthem, Brazil is associated with the attributes of a woman: By having a bosom
at the first stanza: "Em teu *seio,* ó liberdade, [...]" [In thy bosom, O Freedom, ...]
and in the second: " "Nossa vida" no teu *seio* "mais amores." " ["Our life" in thy bosom "more loves."] (Which by the way, is under quotation because it was taken from another poem, also, a funny thing is the word 'seio' in here, which Yuval briefly mentions at 4:11)
And also being referred as a gentle mother to her sons (the people of the country) in the chorus:
"[...] *Dos filhos deste solo és mãe gentil;* Pátria amada, Brasil" [... Of the sons of this soil; Thou art kind mother; Beloved fatherland, Brazil]
and at the end of the second stanza:
"Mas, se ergues da justiça a clava forte; Verás que *um filho teu* não foge à luta; Nem teme, quem te adora, a própria morte." [But if thou raisest the strong gavel of justice; You'll see that *a son of yours* don't flee from battle; Nor do those fear, who loves you, their own death."
Despite this, we never refer to Brazil as "A Brasil" in the feminine, but as "O Brasil", using the masculine article, this is because Brasil is a masculine noun.
Also, note the "Pátria" in the chorus, literally translates to "Fatherland", the meaning of FATHERland is kept in portuguese. The word apparently comes from the latin 'Patris', which comes from 'Pater', means father. Still, the word is a feminine noun, so it's referred to as "A Pátria", not "O Pátria", it would just sound strange, and this happens because of this rule explained right here in 5:25
Also, in both stanzas of the anthem, Brazil is briefly referred with masculine adjectives:
At the end of the first stanza is "Gigante pela própria natureza; És belO, és forte, impávido colosso; E o teu futuro espelha essa grandeza [...]" [Giant by thine own nature; Thou art beautiful, strong, a fearless colossus; And thy future mirrors that greatness ...]
and in the second stanza:
"DeitadO eternamente em berço esplêndido; Ao som do mar e à luz do céu profundo [...]" [Eternally lying on splendid cradle; To the sound of sea and under deep sky light ...]
Joaquim Osório Duque-Estrada, the writer of our anthem, could have used the feminines "Bela" and "Deitada", but he probably chose the masculine nouns due to how it sounds combined with "impávidO colossO", since there is no such a thing like a "ColossA". And also because, at the end of the day, it probably won't really make that much difference, we're talking about a country after all, the meaning of the anthem remains the same even if it briefly uses both masculine and feminine forms: Brazil is a country that act just like a gentle mother to her people, and because of this, her sons would do anything to protect their mother(land), even if it means losing their lives.
Isso foi lindo.
@@allejandrodavid5222 Obrigado. Apesar do Brasil estar cheio de problemas intermináveis, o hino nacional além de ser uma carta de amor, é um desejo otimista de esperança para o Brasil.
Tem uma parte que eu gosto muito do hino que é "E diga o verde-louro dessa flâmula, paz no futuro e glória no passado"
Se for parar para pensar, isso não é o que o verde da bandeira significa, ela foi usada porquê representa a Casa de Bragança, uma família Portuguesa. Porém, o autor do poema altera o significado dessa cor na bandeira, transformando esse símbolo europeu em uma mensagem otimista. E eu acredito que isso foi feito de propósito, o verde está em todo lugar, na natureza, nos esportes, nas bandeiras, nas culturas, e não para.
Ele alterou o significado do verde na bandeira para que toda vez que você olhasse para essa cor se lembrasse desse verso, da mensagem que ele passa e não consegue ser mais clara: "Paz no futuro e glória no passado"
Prosperidade e tranquilidade para frente. Conquistas, vitórias e guerras no passado, nos livros de história e na memória. Ele tenta focar de forma que lembra para que o futuro do país não repita os erros cometidos no passado.
Independente das ideias, origens, culturas, etnias e conflitos de cada filho, a mãe-gentil como um símbolo acolhe todos, biológicos ou adotivos. Mas infelizmente, suas mãos são governadas por outros, que como descreve Chico Buarque em Vai Passar, "engana a pátria mãe distraída e cega os seus filhos que andam perdidos"
7:56 it recently happened in Portuguese!
Words ending in "-agem" are feminine (ex: A filmagem, A carruagem, A passagem).
"Personagem" (character) was also feminine, but since we started calling "O personagem" for masculine characters, the Linguistic Authorities declared this usage as acceptable, even tho it doesn't follow the "-agem" rule.
Also, in French and Spanish, they are all male with the "-age" and "aje" suffix, such as "le voyage", and "el viaje", but in Portuguese, they are female with "a viagem", however, there exists direct exceptions that seem like they came from Portuguese, such as "l'image (f)", and "la imagen", from "a imagem".
As a portuguese, yes, I do think of dress aka "vestido" as masculine. It is not related at all to being associated with men or women more, but it also doesn't give any significant meaning to the object, it just makes me think of them slightly differently. Like I said in another comment, for me it's about contrast in pairs. Dress is masculine, but skirt is feminine. and it feels right to have a pair like that, one long for more serious occasions and one short and cute. But in reality, you can use dresses cutely and casually, and I know that, but from this pair I instinctively think of dresses as formal first. And these pairs of masculine/feminine make me think of the other word. If you say dress, I also think of skirt. Same goes for:
- Shirt (f) / jacket (m)
- pants (f) / shorts (m)
- walls (f) / ceiling and floor (m)
- chair (f) / bench and stool (m)
- van, scooter, bike (f) / car, bus, train, airplane (m)
- house (f) / building (m)
These last few examples show something interesting too. Yes gendered objects don't impact our way of thinking in extreme ways, but why are they that gender to begin with? The fact is that there *is* a contrast being transmitted between a small and cute house, and a building, when speaking portuguese, because language evolved to trasmit that. Same for cars and scooters. And even though vans are bigger than cars, it makes me think of family and summer trips because it is feminine in portuguese.
I would like to know if other gendered language users with different genders for these words have different perspectives on this.
Also, publications not being published and parts being removed is so common, and most times the reasons are bureaucratic, so that doesn't mean much in my opinion.
tl;dr: I think the study is overblown for sure, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's completely false. For me it creates contrasts and pairs between objects. It just depends on the person honestly.
really interesting video. I kind of believe that due to the way these grammatical classes are named, they are unintentionally perceived as having gendered characteristics by the learners of languages that have such systems. when you actually start disassociating the "gender" from the word itself, you start grasping the native-like way of thinking.
like, for example, I'm a native Turkish speaker and Turkish is notably gender-neutral, there's no grammatical gender, there are no articles, there's only one 3rd person singular/plural pronoun, etc. however, that doesn't take away the fact that the society itself is extremely patriarchal and very misogynistic. furthermore, I'm also fluent in French and when I first started learning French, I was like "why is ruler female? what do you mean bread is male??? that doesn't even make any sense!" then I got used to it, and the gendered way of thinking slowly faded away.
that's why I kinda wish that people would forego using the term "gender" when talking about grammar to avoid confusion and having people draw such misaligned conclusions. yeah, it was useful back then, when one of the most apparent ways of making 2- (or 3-) way distinctions was using the most in-your-face characteristic, i.e. gender (while also casually slapping "neuter" for the 3rd one), even though back in PIE (proto-Indo-European) days, the classification was made based on animacy. then things got more complex, languages, people and societies evolved and it went all haywire. but now, we can just let it go and use a new term. like, "class" maybe (yeah, I know it already exists but it's more of a technical term, not the commonplace one)?
anyways, I've rambled on for too long. thank you for reading my TED talk and hope you all have a lovely day. don't forget to rehydrate yourself.
In German, grammatical gender is "Genus", and gender is "Geschlecht". It's less ambiguous this way, and I think English should just start calling grammatical genders word classes or simply use the Latin word genus like German does.
@@vickypedia1308It’s the same in Polish, we call it „rodzaj” which is genus/kind, same as in biological classifications. In fact we don’t have word for gender, it’s usually referred to as „płeć społeczna” - social sex.